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Studies of the mind of Jesus 





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Studies of the Mind of Tesi 


BY 


HUGH GORDON ARLOSS, M.A. 


(ABERDEEN) 


Minister of the First Congregational Church 
Pittsfield, Massachusetts 


Sometime Lecturer in Homiletics in 
Hartford Theological Seminary 


HA 


COPYRIGHTED 
1926 
Hugh Gordon Ross, M. A. 


Press of the 
Eagle Printing and Binding Company 
Pittsfield, Mass. 
1926 


This little book 
is 


DEDICATED 
to all my friends in 


St. ANDREW’S PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, JOHANNESBURG 
St. ANDREW’S PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, CAPETOWN 
PLyMouTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, SEATTLE, WASH. 
First CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, PITTSFIELD, Mass. 


to whom it has been 
my privilege to 
preach 


THE GOSPEL OF JESUS 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/studiesofmindofjOOross_0 


om. 


SHoretoord 


the Christian message, those in the city who 

were not in the habit of attending any church, 
we decided to hold a service every Sunday even- 
ing, in a theatre. Almost from the first these 
services proved, from the point of view of numbers, 
highly successful. Many who attended them had 
not been inside a church for years. The audiences 
included some who were strangers to the New 
Testament, and who knew little of the meaning of 
the Gospel. But from week to week, through five 
seasons, the interest was maintained and, according 
to credible reports, much good accomplished 
through such sermons as are offered to the public 
in this book. 

I am well aware that the authorities on the 
science of homiletics will find much to criticise in 
these pages. The nature of my audience demanded 
the use of colloquialisms, familiarities and repeti- 
tions that would be out of place in any ordinary 
pulpit, and I have no hope that anyone deeply 
versed in Christian ways of thinking will learn 
anything here. At the same time, the sermons are 
published with the thought that they may reach 
and help such persons as those to whom they, 
and many others like them, were originally 
addressed. 


S IVE YEARS AGO, in an effort to reach, with 


HUGH GORDON ROSS 
Pittsfield, Massachusetts 


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Che Supreme Ceacher 


ERY late one night, or rather, very early one 

morning, Socrates,—one of the most famous 
teachers in the history of the world,—was 
lying in his bed asleep. He was roused by a 
tremendous hammering upon his door, and 
when he called to the person outside to enter, he saw 
coming into his room a young Athenian friend of his 
who was evidently full of excitement. Socrates asked 
him what brought him to his house at that unearthly 
hour of the day and he said, ““Haven’t you heard the 
news?” “What news?” “Why,” he said, ““Protagoras 
has come to town. Don’t you know that Protagoras 
is one of the greatest teachers in the world? Don’t 
you want to come and hear what he has to say? How 
can you lie in your bed when a man like that is teach- 
ing in the city? Get your clothes on and let’s go and 
listen to him.’ And that young man would give 
Socrates no peace and no rest until he got out of his 
bed, put on his clothes and went with him to the 
house where Protagoras was teaching. 

As I have read that famous old story,—which you 
will find in the beginning of the dialogue of Plato 
which bears the name of ‘“‘Protagoras’—this has 
passed through my mind:—What would happen if it 
should become known in the middle of this approach- 
ing night, that Jesus Christ of Nazareth, in the very 
form and fashion that he wore in the days of His 





page seven 


flesh, had arrived in this city, and was teaching in 
one of our homes? What do you think would happen? 
Of course, it is probably a little bold to answer for 
other people; and yet I feel inclined to say that, if 
that message were to reach our slumbering homes a 
few hours after we leave this building,—there would 
not be a man or a woman, or a child able to walk, 
who would not go as fast as legs could carry them, 
to the place where Jesus Christ was to be found and 
heard! What an experience it would be, to be able to 
stand around and listen to that holy voice speaking as 
it spoke its wondrous messages to the people two 
thousand years ago! 

While that, of course, is impossible and unthinka- 
ble, in the providence of God it so happens that we 
have in all our homes, I hope, a copy of a large part of 
the teaching of Jesus Christ. We can go home tonight 
and open our New Testament and we can listen, as 
we read, to the very words that Jesus uttered, although 
not, of course, in our language, as He spoke those 
parables and as He preached those sermons to the 
people among whom He lived. I regard that,—and I 
am sure you agree with me in regarding that,—as 
one of the greatest privileges which we as rational 
beings enjoy,—the privilege of being able to come 
into touch whenever we please with the mind of Jesus. 
Here in these Sunday evening hours, that is the very 
thing that we hope to do. We are simply going to sit 
around the feet of Jesus and we are going to find out 
what He has to say to us on the questions which He 
Himself discussed. 


page eight 


Do you believe that it is possible for a group of 
thoughtful men and women like ourselves to spend 
half an hour with Jesus every Sunday evening, with- 
out deriving great profit to ourselves and without 
making, through that profit, a precious contribution 
to the religious thinking and to the religious behaviour 
of the community to which we belong? I do not be- 
lieve that is possible. I believe that it is inevitable 
that, if we come humbly and reverently to learn of 
this supreme Teacher, there will come into our lives 
new light and new power and new patience and new 
insight and new zeal and new forbearance and new 
passion for holy things; and if our lives are touched 
and changed in those ways, we can not but touch and 
change the lives of others. What a noble thing it would 
be if we could make a contribution like that to the 
life of this city where we live! 

Let us think this evening for a few moments of 
some of the qualities of the teaching of Jesus, which 
make it desirable and profitable for us to sit at his 
feet and learn of Him. First of all, there is the quality 
of simplicity. I mentioned a few moments ago the 
name of one of the great teachers of the world— 
Plato. Well now, a man needs to be a fairly studious 
individual in order to make very much of Plato. 
Plato’s teaching comes to us in a form which it is very 
difficult to appreciate and understand; and so if you 
were to go through America tonight and count the 
men and women in the country who really know 
Plato, you would be surprised to find how few they 
are. But Jesus comes to us with His great and gracious 
messages embodied in the very simplest forms of 


page nine 


language, so that even a little child can make some- 
thing of them and rejoice in their beauty. 

That is the difficulty with some of these teachers,— 
the great scientists and the great philosophers,—we 
can’t understand them; perhaps they are trying to 
say something very good and very wonderful but 
we can’t understand them. A few weeks ago there 
was a famous scientist giving a lecture on physics in 
Liverpool, and the lecture was put on the radio; and 
the next morning people asked, ““What on earth was 
that we had on the radio last night? We didn’t under- 
stand a single word of it; we don’t want to hear a 
thing like that again.’ There weren’t a hundred men 
in England who understood that. 

Could you find a hundred men in America who 
would not understand anything Jesus said, if we 
were to read some of these messages of the Son of 
God? How grateful we ought to be, and how grateful 
many of us are, that Jesus spoke so simply! And one 
of the qualities of the simplicity of Jesus was the way 
in which He bound up some of His utterances in these 
memorable little phrases. We read some of them 
tonight. ““Ye are the light of the world.” “‘Ye are the 
salt of the earth.”’““Come unto Me and I will give you 
rest.”’ “In My Father’s house are many mansions.”’ 
“T am the good shepherd.’ Why, we could mention 
hundreds of exquisite little sentences like those, 
which could be picked at random, which we can 
not forget once we have heard them. They simply 
stick in our souls forever, doing us wondrous good. 
That is the first quality we are all glad of—the sim- 
plicity of the teaching of Jesus; for we are not all 


page ten 


great scholars, and, if it were difficult, a great many 
of us would never understand or enjoy it at all! 

There is another thing—it is the atmosphere of the 
teaching of Jesus. Did you ever notice, as you read 
the New Testament, how Jesus always deals with 
the great and the supreme matters of human interest? 
He is always on the high and lofty levels of thought 
and speech, talking to us about God or about our own 
destiny or about the ways and the means which we 
may employ to make our lives more radiant and more 
fruitful in every good and lovely thing. 

And the consequence of that is this: That there is 
not a man or a woman or a child in the world who is 
not capable of being interested in the message of 
Jesus. You can think tonight of lots of things that all 
the people in the world are not interested in. For 
instance, who is going to be the next president of the 
United States? That may be a very interesting ques- 
tion to you, but there are millions of people in the 
world who don’t care who is going to be the next 
president of the United States. Is Germany to con- 
tinue to be a Republic? Well, there are people in this 
country and in other countries who are interested in 
that question, but there are many millions who are 
not interested in it at all. I can imagine myself going 
into your home and asking you that question, and 
your answer would be: ““What do [ care? That doesn’t 
interest me. I am interested in other things.’ Come 
and look at the people who are sitting around the feet 
of Jesus tonight; just shut your eyes a moment and 
get that picture before your imagination,—Jesus 
Christ’s class; the great men—statesmen, merchants, 


page eleven 


scientists, and they are sitting around listening to 
Jesus, learning of Him; the simple, uneducated, un- 
tutored people—thousands and thousands of them, 
in India, China, Africa,—there they are in the group, 
and what hundreds of thousands of bright and happy 
little children who know nothing at all about these 
political and diplomatic questions that interest some 
of us—there they sit around Jesus, listening and 
drinking it all in to their little souls. 

There never was in the history of the world another 
teacher who had a class like the class that Jesus 
teaches,—all sorts and conditions of men, all sorts 
and conditions of women, all interested in what He 
says. Why? Because He talks, and talks always, 
about those questions in which human beings, as 
such, are interested—God and sin and redemption 
and heaven and hell! That is why Jesus has such a 
motley class around Him every day,—because He is 
interesting them in the central places of their lives. 
It is going to do us some good—isn’t it, to get away 
with Jesus to those supreme and central questions, 
that in the long run control all our thinking and 
all our acting, with respect to the questions that are 
not supreme, but subordinate ? 

And then there is another quality. Jesus always 
practised what He preached. Jesus never asked any- 
one to do anything that He was not Himself actually 
doing, or willing, when a certain situation arose, to 
do. That has not been true of many of the teachers of 
the world. Teachers like Socrates, like Plato, many 
of the great modern teachers of morality, would be 
only too willing to declare-——as many of them have 


page twelve 


actually declared in their own books,—that their 
conception of the moral life was so high and noble a 
thing that it was impossible for them to live accord- 
ing to their own teaching! 

That is a remarkable thing about Jesus, isn’t it? 
His teaching about the moral life of men is the high- 
est and the deepest that has ever been offered in the 
history of the race; and in spite of that fact, it is im- 
possible for anyone in this house tonight to point to a 
situation recorded in the New Testament where Jesus 
did not live up to His own standard! Just’ because 
that is so remarkable a fact, men and women in all 
the ages since Jesus lived have insisted upon drawing 
from that fact a stupendous inference,—that Jesus 
must have had some peculiar and unique relation to 
God. But we will come to that later on. All that I 
want to emphasize here this evening is this:—What 
a glorious satisfaction there is in sitting at the feet of 
a teacher who is living out day by day before our eyes, 
in the pages of the New Testament, the very thing 
He teaches other men! And that is a satisfaction that 
we may all have as we look into the eyes of Jesus and 
listen to the things He says to us! 

Now finally, I want to speak to you for a moment 
about the effectiveness of the teaching of Jesus. Of 
course, there are some people who go about the world 
wearing spectacles with smoked glass in them; there- 
fore, the world always seems to them just a little bit 
darker than it really is; they look around the world 
and they don’t see any great improvement, the world 
isn’t getting on very far or fast; Jesus’ teaching hasn’t 
amounted to very much. Let us go on an imaginary 


page thirteen 


trip this evening,—it won’t take us long, and it won’t 
cost us anything. We will go to a typical little New 
England town,—it has no name nor can it be found 
on any map. 

We are arriving, just going into the town. What is 
the first thing you see? I suppose the first thing is 
rows and rows of little homes, just the kind of homes 
you live in yourselves, perhaps. What is going on 
there? In spite of all that is said in the newspapers 
and in spite of all the scandalous stories,—in a re- 
markably large number of those homes you would 
find tonight a man who loves his wife purely and 
faithfully, and you would find these two people con- 
scientiously striving to do the very best for each other 
that they can do with the resources at their disposal. 
You would find them deeply and intelligently con- 
cerned about the education and the development 
and the future of their little children. In other words, 
you would find beauty, purity, honest labor, eager 
hope, filling the rooms of that little home. I want to 
say to you that the fact that there are so many homes 
of that character in America tonight, and scattered 
all over the world, is due directly to the fact that 
Jesus stood upon this planet once, and uttered the 
teaching that we are going to study in these Sunday 
evenings together! 

Still, we are not through with the trip yet. Let us 
leave those homes and walk along a little way, and 
we will probably come to a hospital. What is the in- 
spiration of these great American and European and 
Indian and African hospitals? Why is it that these 
poor, sick and suffering people are being looked after 


page fourteen 


tonight all over the world, with all this expensive, 
loving care, even if they can’t afford to pay a penny 
for it? The inspiration of that work of loving kindness 
came directly from the teaching of Jesus! 

A little further on in the same village you will come 
probably to a church, pointing its finger-to the skies, 
—a church in which some humble teacher stands from 
Sunday to Sunday, expressing to his people the very 
truth that he has found in Christ, and bringing the 
hand of Jesus, with its gracious touch, near to every 
life in that community. The teaching of Jesus is the 
secret and the source of the beauty and of the power 
and of the service that are to be found in that little 
New England town; and that is true of thousands of 
towns all over the world tonight! 

Don’t you believe the man who says that the teach- 
ing of Jesus hasn’t counted for much. If you were to 
take out of American life at this moment everything 
which has come to have a place in it owing directly 
to the teaching of Jesus,—what do you suppose you 
would have left? Nothing that would be worth your 
while to keep,—nothing! We owe all that is good in 
our national life directly to the teaching of Jesus! 
You may say there is one thing that the teaching of 
Jesus hasn’t done very much to destroy and abolish 
from the children of men, and that is the hideous in- 
stitution which we call War. 

That, of course, is a large question and I will only 
permit myself at this moment to say this about it. 
Men talk of this and that and the other way of stop- 
ping war; some of them are writing essays and enter- 
ing competitions and striving for prizes, with all their 


page fifteen 


wonderful proposals as to how in the world war is to 
be stopped. I am not going to win any prize and I am 
not going to try any competition; but I am going to 
give you now the true answer to that question, and 
it is this-—When the souls and the minds and the 
imaginations of men and women everywhere are 
impregnated and taken captive by the teaching of 
the Son of God, then we will beat our swords into 
plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, and 
we shall learn the art of war no more! That is the real 
and the only true answer, and that is what we are 
engaged in here these Sunday evenings. We are going 
to try to impregnate our own minds and consciences 
and imaginations with the teaching of Jesus; and to 
that extent we shall play our part in abolishing and 
destroying from our midst and from the world, this 
hateful thing that we call war, which still stalks across 
the earth in so many baleful, hideous forms! 


page sixteen 


What Jesus Caught Concerning God 





(@E®|F you were to make a study,—as I dare say 

141 some of you have made a study,—of the his- 
tory of human thought, you would discover 
that that history consists very largely of the 
attempts made by thoughtful men to arrive 
at the truth concerning God. If you were to go away 
back, for example, and study some of the books 
written by the ancient Greeks, you would discover 
that what they were doing was striving to discover 
the truth about God; and if you were to make a study 
of the books written in our own lifetime by some of 
the great philosophical thinkers of this country, you 
would find that what those thinkers are still trying 
to do is to arrive at the truth concerning God. Men 
have felt in all lands and in all ages, that there is 
nothing in our life that is more important than that 
we should find out the truth about God. Everything 
else in our life seems to depend on what we believe 
about God; therefore, it would seem to be unspeak- 
ably important that our beliefs about God should be 
as true as we can possibly make them. 

This evening we are going to ask what it is that 
Jesus teaches about God and I am going to answer 
that question in the words of Jesus Himself; because 
it is at His feet that we wish in these meetings to sit 
and it is to His voice that we desire to listen. So I am 
going to pick out tonight, from the recorded teaching 





page seventeen 


of Jesus, three of the most wonderful and helpful 
things that Jesus said about God; and I want to say 
that if there are those here, young people perhaps, 
who find some things that will be said, difficult to 
understand, you hold on to these three great words of 
Jesus and carry them away with you in your minds 
and in your hearts and think them over during the 
week; and you will find that you will get far more 
good out of them than you could ever get out of me 
or any other man who could come and stand and speak 
on this platform. 

The first word is this: “God ts a spirit.’ Ever since 
Jesus uttered those words, men have felt that they 
constitute one of the greatest of the messages of 
Jesus. What do they mean? When Jesus said that God 
is a spirit, He meant, first of all, that God is a per- 
sonal being. Of course, you know perfectly well that 
there have been lots of people in the world, and even 
important religious teachers, who have not believed 
that God is a personal being; there has been one, at 
least, of the great religious systems still in existence, 
exercising an extremely powerful: influence in the 
continent of Asia, which does not believe that God 
is a person at all. That is one form of the religion of 
Buddhism. Jesus tells us that God is a person and 
the more we think about that, the more carefully we 
examine that, the more clearly does its importance 
dawn upon our minds. | 

What is a person? What do we mean by saying 
that God is a person? That is a very important ques- 
tion. I will also quite frankly admit that it is a very 
difficult question; but this, at any rate, must be said 


page eighteen 


in answer to it—that no one is entitled to the name of 
person who does not possess two things,—first, a 
mind; and secondly, a will. We call ourselves persons 
because we possess what we are pleased to call our 
minds. Perhaps some of us do not possess very power- 
ful minds; we are not among the great intellectual 
leaders of the world, some of us, perhaps none of us; 
but at the same time we have a mind. We say we make 
up our mind, or we change our mind; everybody is 
familiar with that expression; and we have also a will. 
We don’t need to be very old before people say that 
we have wills of our own. Perhaps sometimes you have 
taken somebody into your house to see your baby 
and the first thing you heard him say was, “‘The little 
fellow has a will of his own’, probably because he 
doesn’t want to do what you want him to do, or 
something of that sort. Any sort of creature who has 
not a mind and a will is not a person; and the higher 
and better a mind and will you have, the more en- 
titled are you to the name of person. And there was 
one great thinker once who said that nobody on earth 
has a complete mind and a complete will; the only 
person in existence that has a complete mind and will 
is God, and therefore, He is the only real person, and 
we are all striving and struggling to be persons like Him. 

In other words,—if I may put it into the language 
of another great thinker, an American thinker,—per- 
sonality has to be defined in terms of purpose. What 
is a purpose? A purpose is something that you make 
up your mind about and which you then exercise your 
will upon; and when Jesus said that God is a spirit, 
meaning that God is a person, He taught that God 


page nineteen 


is a being Who, in His own life, conceives and carries 
out purposes. That is a tremendous thing to believe 
about God, but of course that is not enough for us to 
know. The purposes that God conceives and carries 
out might be very unwise purposes, or they might 
even be very cruel purposes. We have known people in 
history who have conceived and carried out purposes of 
very great cruelty, also purposes of great unwisdom 
and foolishness. What if God were a person like that? 

And so we pass on to the second great word of Jesus, 
one of the most wonderful things that Jesus has given 
to us as a spiritual possession forevermore, and one of 
those statements which have affected the whole his- 
tory of human thinking and of human behavior since 
Jesus first uttered it in Judea:—‘‘Your Father in 
heaven is perfect.” That is one of the great utterances 
of the New Testament; that is one of the greatest 
utterances in the history of religion. ‘““Your Father in 
heaven is perfect.” First of all, this God Who is a 
person is our father. What does that mean? First, I 
think it means to say that we owe our very existence 
to that God Who is a person. He determined that He 
would create us and it is through His power and His 
wisdom that we are here at all. It is He that made us 
and not we ourselves. 

But that is not all it means, because Jesus wouldn’t 
have used the word “‘Father” if that was all He meant 
to convey. When Jesus calls God the Father who is in 
heaven, He means us to think of God as one Who is 
deeply interested in the creatures that He has made, 
just as the fathers in this building tonight are very 
deeply interested in their children at home. What 


page twenty 


would you think of a father who would be prepared 
to say to you, “Oh yes, those are my children, but I 
am not interested in them?” What a dreadful thing 
that would be for a father to say! When Jesus tells us 
that this great divine person is our Father in heaven, 
He means by that that God is deeply and permanently 
interested in the children whom He Himself has made. 
What a precious and wonderful thing it is for us here 
tonight to be able to believe that God, the creator and 
ruler of the universe, is interested in us, interested in 
each of us, that in one single word, God loves His 
children! That is what is meant by calling God our 
Father; but that is not all that Jesus says in that re- 
markable utterance of His. 

He says that our Father who is in heaven is perfect. 
It seems to me that what He meant when he said that, 
was this: That the purpose which God had when He 
created you and me, was a purpose of absolute wisdom, 
as well as of absolute goodness. This purpose of God 
is not yet completed. God is still working out his 
purpose for you and for me and what a wonderful 
thing it is for us to believe,—as we may believe if we 
are followers of Jesus,—that God is working out in 
our lives day by day for us a purpose that is abso- 
lutely wise and absolutely good; that God never makes 
any mistakes; and that God never does any evil to 
his children! What a rich and wonderful little utter- 
ance it is, isn’t it? ““Your father in heaven is perfect.” 
How it binds us up with God and makes us feel safe 
and comfortable in the embrace of those almighty and 
most holy arms! 


page twenty-one 


There is one more word that I want to refer to to- 
night. It is this: “Are not two sparrows sold for a 
farthing? Yet one of them shall not fall to the ground 
uithout your Father.” I have kept that till the last 
because I believe it to be the best. This life of ours is 
all the time full of mystery; and from time to time 
there comes into our human life some great sorrow 
or some great pain or some great trial, and when that 
hour and that experience come to us, we are all of us 
tempted to think that God our Father has forgotten 
us, or else that it is not true to say that God is our 
Father at all. 

Now, in this golden word of Jesus which I have 
quoted to you tonight, He deliberately attempts to 
make us believe that the love and the care of God is 
absolutely omnipresent, if you will allow me to use 
such a word as that. You can not go into any corner 
of the earth where you will not find the care of God 
waiting for you. You can not go into any sort of ex- 
perience, no matter how grim and bleak it may appear 
to be, in which God’s care is not waiting for you. As 
we heard from the choir this very evening: “‘His tender 
mercies are over all His works.’ Think of that poor 
little sparrow, practically valueless, falling to the 
ground, nobody paying any attention to it, save God, 
and His hand is almighty and controls the sparrow’s 
fall. And just as God controls the fall of the sparrow, 
just as that little sparrow has its place in the providen- 
tial purpose of the living Father, so also have your 
sorrows and your trials and your pains and your 
tribulations. God is over-ruling and controlling every 
one of them and He is over-ruling and controlling them 


page twenty-two 


for your good! That is what Jesus teaches, that is 
what Jesus means when He declares that not a spar- 
row falls to the ground without our Father. 

Isn’t it a glorious thing to be able to go back into 
the world tomorrow morning feeling such arms around 
us,—knowing that such a heart beats for us in the 
central places of the life of God,—that we are dear to 
Him and that there is not a thing in our life, no matter 
how small it may be, that is not of interest and con- 
cern to our Father who is in heaven? I submit that in 
those three statements of Jesus we have the greatest 
and the best thing that He ever taught about God; 
and I want you, as I said at the beginning, to think 
them over as you go from this theatre tonight; talk 
them over as you go to your homes this evening and 
tomorrow; and just see what a precious inheritance 
Jesus has given us in making it possible for us to be- 
lieve these things about God! 

If we have a father like that,—so great, so good, 
so near in His grace,—what sort of sons and daughters 
do you think we ought to be? Don’t you think we 
ought to try to be as good to God as we can? Don’t 
you think that we ought in all that we do to try to 
show forth our love and our gratitude to Him for 
being so good to us? And our study of God’s nature 
and character here tonight will not have been in vain 
if there would be one son or one daughter who will go 
out of this place in a moment or two and walk along 
the streets saying, “I will be a better son, I will be a 
better daughter, of the glorious ea from tonight 
till the end of my life!” 


page twenty-three 


Wheat Fess Caught Concerning Himself 





@ L@|N every age since Jesus lived on this earth, 
“| there have been multitudes of men and of 
women who have believed and declared very 
| extraordinary things about Him. And ee 

*2 ¢=0| scattered all over the face of the world, 
every land that you can mention, there is a great com- 
pany of men and women of all trades and professions, 
of all ranks in society, serving under all sorts of flags 
and all sorts of governments, who regard and wor- 
ship Jesus as divine. So wonderful a conception of a 
person who once lived as a man on this world of our 
own, is something which requires an explanation. 

If any person in this building tonight were to say 
of himself or of any friend of his, or of any other figure 
in the history of the world, that he was divine—in 
the sense in which that word has always been used by 
the Christian church, of Jesus—that person’s friends 
would instantly believe that he had taken leave of his 
senses. Why, then, should so many intelligent men and 
women believe about Jesus what every one of them 
would refuse to believe about any other human person 
that has ever lived? My answer to that extremely 
important question is, that the explanation of this 
impressive fact is to be found in the teaching of Jesus, 
and especially in what Jesus taught about Himself. 
For those who seriously desire to know what Jesus 
taught about Himself, what claims Jesus made upon 
His own behalf, there is in my opinion no passage in 






page twenty-four 


the whole of the New Testament which is more im- 
portant than that wonderful passage which begins 
with words that are familiar to everybody: “Come 
unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I 
will give you rest.” If you read the whole of that right 
to the end of the chapter, you find that Jesus is taking 
up a position of supreme authority and power, de- 
claring that no man but Himself can give to men, 
what men most deeply need and yearn for; claiming 
that He, however, can give it to them, and that in 
royal and unfailing abundance. 

And if you cast your eye back in that same chapter 
a few verses, you will come upon one of the most re- 
markable utterances that ever fell from the lips of 
Jesus. At first sight, it doesn’t appeal to us so deeply 
as that gracious invitation I have just quoted; and 
yet, when you study it carefully, you find that it is 
bound up with that invitation and that it gives to the 
invitation with which the chapter closes, all the 
precious meaning that it contains for us; and this is 
the passage which I am referring to: ““No man knoweth 
the Father but the Son and he to whomsoever the 
Son willeth to reveal Him.” What an extraordinary 
statement that is! 

In the first place, let me say about that statement, 
that here Jesus quite deliberately and very plainly 
claims for Himself a complete knowledge of God. We 
have to note the fact that no other person who ever 
lived on earth, so far as we know, has ever made that 
claim upon his own behalf. None of the great prophets 
ever made that claim; no founder of any religion save 
our own ever made that claim; none of the great phil- 


page twenty-five 


osophers or scientists ever made that claim. Why, 
some of you will remember that last Sunday evening, 
in this very place, it was pointed out that if you 
studied the whole history of human thought, you 
would discover that it consists very largely of an 
attempt on the part of thoughtful people everywhere, 
to know the truth about God. The strange thing about 
Jesus is, that He claims to have possessed that for 
which all other men toil and labor without ceasing— 
a complete knowledge of God! 

Just think what a blasphemous thing it would be 
for me or for you to claim that our knowledge of God 
was complete. Why, you do not have even a com- 
plete knowledge of your next-door neighbor; no, you 
do not have a complete knowledge even of your own 
child, or of whatever person it is that lives nearest to 
you in the circle of love in the home. Our knowledge 
is so fragmentary; we secure it piece by piece, and day 
by day and year by year we patiently strive to build 
the pieces up into a beautiful temple of truth. Jesus 
claims to possess a complete knowledge of God! 

Let me ask you now to consider for a moment what 
that really involves, with regard to the moral life of 
Jesus. There was a principle which Jesus was very 
fond of expounding to His disciples when He lived in 
the world with them, and it was a principle which all 
true thinkers have come to see as one of extreme im- 
portance in all our moral strivings, and it was this: 
That our knowledge of God grows and increases only 
insofar as we from day to day obey the law of God; 
the only avenue to knowledge of God is obedience to 
His will. Now then, if that principle is sound—and I 


page twenty-six 


think that not one man or woman here will question 
the statement—and if Jesus claimed to possess an 
absolute and complete knowledge of God,—the neces- 
sary inference is that He claimed also to be in His 
moral life absolutely and completely obedient to the 
will of God; because, only with an absolute obedience 
would an absolute knowledge be possible. 

Therefore, in this extraordinary statement of Jesus 
which I have quoted to you tonight, we find Him ex- 
plicitly claiming a perfect knowledge of the divine 
Being, claiming also, by a necessary implication, 
absolute obedience to the will of God in His moral 
life; in other words, claiming moral perfection! Now, 
it is one thing for a human being to set up claims for 
himself; it is quite another thing for his neighbors 
and his friends and especially for his enemies, to admit 
the validity of those claims. Suppose, for example, 
that some man in this theatre tonight were publicly 
to claim tomorrow, in the newspapers, that he was 
the best man in the city. How many people do you 
suppose would agree with you? Do you suppose that 
your own wife would agree with you? Well, I hope 
she would; but still she would probably regard you 
as rather silly in making such a claim as that. But I 
can’t believe that your business friends would agree 
with you; they would say among themselves, ““Why, 
I know ten men better than that fellow.”’ You couldn’t 
get away with it. And as for your enemies, in the 
paper next day they would have all sorts of letters 
telling all sorts of failures and shortcomings that they 
had detected in your life for the last twenty years. 
They would explode your claim in two or three days; 


page twenty-seven 


you know it, and so you don’t make any such state- 
ment. 

What about this claim of Jesus? The truth about 
this claim of Jesus is that, as He walked about among 
His friends and among His foes, there was to be found 
no man capable of laying his finger on any corner in 
the life of Jesus and saying, “Here thou hast failed. 
Here thy claim of moral beauty and perfection breaks 
down.”’ Not only has the life of Jesus been put to the 
test, the severe test, of the observation and the criti- 
cism of those of His own time and place, but the life 
of Jesus has been put to the test of history; because 
I want to say, and I am sure you believe it is true,— 
that no human life ever lived on this planet has been 
so minutely examined under the microscope by every 
sort of historian and philosopher, as the life of Jesus. 
And what is the verdict? In the Nineteenth Century 
one of the deepest and most conscientious philosophie 
thinkers in England was John Stuart Mill. Mill did 
not believe in Jesus in the sense in which most of you 
and in which I believe in Him. He did not believe 
that Jesus was the bearer to this world of a divine 
revelation which could never be surpassed. Mill did 
not believe that Jesus was the Son of God, in the sense 
in which we believe Him to be the Son of God. But 
Mill, having examined with the eyes of an historian 
and a scientist and a philosopher, the life of Jesus, 
said that it would be impossible to set up any higher 
moral standard for any man’s life than that that man 
should so live that Christ would approve his life! 
That means to say that if Mill was not prepared to 
say all that some of us would say about Jesus, at any 


page twenty-eight 


rate, he did believe, he was forced by the evidence to 
believe, that Jesus’ was the purest and the most 
lovely human life of which history has any record! 

In other words, the claim that Jesus made for Him- 
self of moral beauty and perfection, has been corrob- 
orated by almost the unanimous testimony of thought- 
ful men and women everywhere. No man can find a 
flaw in the moral character of Jesus. Now then, if we, 
by putting to the test that part of His claim which 
is capable of being put to such a test, discover that 
claim to be true, are we not compelled, as thoughtful 
and honest people, to draw the necessary inference, 
namely, that if the moral life of Jesus was perfect in 
its beauty, He must have been talking nothing less 
than the sober, simple truth when He declared that 
He possessed a perfect knowledge of God! 

If we accept this statement of Jesus with respect 
to Himself,—that His knowledge of God is complete, 
—what bearing has that upon our meetings here on 
Sunday nights? Simply this: That the voice of Jesus 
comes to us with an assurance and an authority never 
before possessed by any voice that was ever heard in 
the world. No wonder that we are reverent and patient 
as we seek to learn, at the feet of this supreme, in- 
comparable teacher, the things He tells us about God 
and about men and about destiny! 

There are two more things which I will say tonight 
very briefly, because we shall have to take them up 
later. Out of the moral perfection of Jesus, there 
arises His claim to be also our Saviour. From those 
forces within us and around us which mar our own 
moral beauty and perfection, those things that keep 


page twenty-nine 


us from the heights where Jesus trod, He claims to 
be able to deliver us. ‘I am come to seek and to save 
the lost.” “The Son of Man came not to be ministered 
unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom 
for many.” Jesus yearns to be the Saviour of us all 
and to bring into our lives, no matter who we are, no 
matter what our earthly lot may be,—that beauty 
that was in Him and which has won the heart of the 
world! 

And this also—there is nothing,—and I say these 
words very deliberately—there is nothing in the 
recorded teaching of Jesus which is more emphati- 
cally declared over and over again, sometimes in 
language of imagery, sometimes in the language of 
plain and simple prose, than that He will one day 
come to be our Judge! Our lives are to be set up against 
His perfect life; His beauty is to be the standard of 
our judgment. That is a very solemn truth to me, 
because I feel from day to day that I can deceive lots 
of people with regard to the real meaning and value 
and quality of my life, but it is impossible to deceive 
Jesus. There is no judge in the world that has never 
been deceived by evidence laid before him in a court 
of justice; but when Jesus stands before us as our 
Judge, He knows—there is no deceiving of the mind 
of Christ—and on His part there can be no erroneous 
judgment. 

Let us carry this away with us tonight—we may 
have Jesus for our Saviour; we must have Jesus for 
our Judge! Let us think these things over; let us go 
back over the history of the world since Jesus lived 
and died and rose again, and let us see how His claim 


page thirty 


has been more and more completely corroborated 
with every new age and generation; and then let us 
ask ourselves whether we are not prepared this very 
night to bow upon our knees before His blessed face 
and say to Him, in the words of one of the church’s 
oldest and noblest songs: 
“Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ; 
Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father!” 


page thirty-one 


What Jesus Tanght Concerning Din 


Q OBODY can read the New Testament with- 
ff] out discovering not only that Jesus had a 
great deal to say about sin, but also that He 
thought of Himself as standing in a very 
remarkable relation to the sin of the world. 
Most of the people in this building tonight will re- 
member that, before Jesus was born, a remarkable 
statement was made concerning him and it was this: 
“Thou shalt call His name Jesus, because He will 





save His people from their sins.” “Jesus” means 
‘Saviour’. When we begin to study the gospel story 
with a view to learning, for ourselves, what Jesus 
taught on this subject of sin, we are surprised perhaps 
a little to discover that Jesus nowhere said anything 
about a subject that has been of great interest to 
thoughtful men and women throughout the history 
of the Christian religion, namely, this: What is the 
origin of sin? Where did sin come from? How did sin 
arise in a world that was made by a good God? 

A great many large and difficult volumes have been 
written on that subject; a great many scholarly peo- 
ple have spent years in thinking about it and in speak- 
ing about it and in writing about it; but in the New 
Testament you will not find one word that was ever 
said by Jesus on that subject. Apparently, it was a 
question which had no interest for Him and which 
He regarded as being of very little importance to us, 


page thirty-two 


because if He had thought of it as being important, 
He would no doubt have said something about it. 
The important thing in the mind of Jesus was, not 
how sin came to exist, but the fact that sin does ac- 
tually exist. It was with this horrible reality of 
evil that Jesus concerned Himself and it was from 
the dominion of this horrible reality that He gave 
His life to deliver the children of men. 

The first thing with regard to this fact of sin that 
I would like to say in our study of the teaching of 
Jesus tonight, is this—that according to the thought 
of Jesus, sin is absolutely universal among men and 
women. If you would like me to prove that Jesus be- 
lieved that, I think the very easiest way to satisfy 
you is to refer to the Lord’s Prayer, in the very heart 
of which you find this petition:—‘“‘Forgive us our 
trespasses.”’ That was a prayer which was given by 
Jesus to His friends and which I believe He meant 
His friends to hand on to their friends through the 
generations that were yet to come; so that we ourselves 
tonight, and all other lovers of the name of Jesus 
throughout the world, are familiar with that prayer 
and constantly use it, reminding ourselves every 
time we bow our heads and say those sacred words, 
that Jesus believed that it was necessary for all men 
to use such a petition; because sin was a real fact and 
a real force in the life of every one of them. 

There is no man, there is no woman anywhere 
who is wholly free from the presence and from the 
power of sin! Sometimes we imagine that that is 
rather an extreme way of putting it and we are 
tempted to say within ourselves, “‘Well, I think I 


page thirty-three 


know some men and women in whose lives there 
appears to be no sin of any kind at all’’. Let us bring 
our own lives and the lives of all men everywhere to 
the test of the standard of Jesus Himself tonight, and 
that standard is this: “Be ye therefore perfect, as 
your Father in heaven is perfect.” Jesus conceives 
as being in some measure under the power of sin 
every life which is not yet wholly what God would 
have it to be. Where is the man in this audience this 
evening who would be prepared to say that he is 
already perfect? Where is the man to be found, the 
sane and thoughtful man, who would be willing to 
come forward onto this platform or any other plat- 
form and declare, “Since such and such a day I have 
lived a perfect life?’? No such man is to be found. 

I wonder if everybody in this theatre has heard of 
a little book which was written a great many years 
ago, called by the name of “The Shorter Catechism?” 
Oh yes, I know some of you have heard of it and some 
of you don’t want to hear any more about it, because 
many of us, when we were younger than we are today, 
had to learn the Shorter Catechism in the Sunday 
School and in the day school, too. But I defy any man 
to stand up today and say he did harm to himself by 
it. One of the questions in the Shorter Catechism is 
—‘What is sin?” And here is the answer: “‘Sin is any 
want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law 
of God.” 

Suppose we take that old-fashioned answer, which 
I may say here is wholly according to the mind of 
Jesus, and apply that to our own lives just as we are 
living them now. “Any want of conformity to, or 


page thirty-four 


transgression of, the law of God.” There are, of course, 
many people who do not go about spending their 
time and their strength deliberately breaking the law 
of God. There are comparatively few people in any 
community who do that; nevertheless, most of us 
find ourselves occasionally, when the temptation is 
very strong, breaking some of the laws of God. But 
whether we deliberately break His laws or not, surely 
it is true that there is not one of us here this evening 
who is not daily coming short of a complete con- 
formity to that most holy law. 

Do you ever go to bed at night patting yourself on 
the back (if I may use such an expression) on account 
of the fact that during the day that is then closing, 
you have lived your life fully, absolutely, up to the 
very limit of God’s highest and most exacting re- 
quirement for you? I should think, on the contrary, 
that most of us when we retire to rest, trouble our- 
selves oftentimes over the fact that we have lost this 
or that opportunity of doing good; that here or there 
we have indeed failed to live up to the stature of 
Christian manhood or of Christian womanhood. We 
may not be able to recall a single hour of the day in 
which we have deliberately said to God, “I will not 
do this thing that thou requirest of me” and yet we 
find it impossible to say that we have indeed lived 
completely as His children. That is what Jesus set 
before us as the real standard of our life. ““Be ye there- 
fore perfect, as your Father who is in heaven is per- 
fect”’, and anything that is short of that brings us 
into the category of sinners and makes us confess 


page thirty-five 


humbly before His throne tonight that we have in- 
deed, all of us, sinned! 

At the same time, while Jesus believed and stated 
repeatedly, directly or indirectly, that all the men 
and women round about Him were sinful, He did not 
say that all men and women were equally sinful. On 
the contrary, He made it very plain that in His mind 
some sins were far worse than others; and the strange 
thing about the mind of Jesus on this subject is, that 
the sins which He most violently condemned were 
not the sins which we, as a rule, are inclined most 
violently to condemn. In fact, Jesus divided sinners 
into two great groups; and the first of these groups 
contained those whom He described by the general ex- 
pression of *‘publicans and sinners.’’ Who were these 
publicans and sinners? These were men and women 
who had by degrees given themselves over at last 
wholly to evil ways,—thieves, liars, adulterers, men 
and women of all kinds of unclean ways of life; and 
it is a notorious fact that Jesus spent much of His 
time on earth in the company of people like that. So 
much indeed was this the case, that from time to 
time people used to come to the disciples of Jesus and 
say to them, “Does your Master know what sort of 
people those are He is going about with? These are 
the worst people in the town and if He doesn’t take 
care, He will become contaminated and like them in 
the end.” And when Jesus heard those stories He used 
to say, no doubt with a gracious smile upon His face, 
“IT am come not to call the righteous but sinners to 
repentance. To live among these people is the very 
purpose for which I came into the world;’’ because 


page thirty-six 


Jesus saw at the very centre of the most rotten life 
on earth, some gleam that had not yet been extin- 
guished, and He was sure that if only He could get 
down to the depths of that poor, poisoned life and 
lay His gracious hand upon that still wholesome place, 
He could bring that life right back and up and out, 
until at last that creature that seemed to be utterly 
lost and hopeless might become, not in name only 
but in deed and in truth, a child of the living Father! 
Jesus lived among these men because He was seeking 
their souls; He was yearning for their salvation. That 
is what He came for. “The Son of Man is come to 
seek and to save that which was lost.” 

We have no right ever to despair of any man or of 
any woman, no matter how bad and hopeless looking 
the case may be; for Jesus never despaired of anybody. 
There is something in the worst of men that can still 
respond to the voice and to the touch of God! That is 
the teaching of Jesus. 

There was another class of sinners, and they were 
called the Pharisees and they were sinners of a very 
different order. They didn’t go about publicly sinning, 
as these other poor creatures did; they were not re- 
garded, as these other people were regarded, as the 
off-scourings of society. The Pharisees, many of them, 
held the most important positions, the most con- 
spicuous stations, both in the city and in the syna- 
gogue; men who were looked up to by their fellow 
citizens as leaders of thought, leaders of policy, leaders 
in commerce, leaders in every good word and work. 
And yet Jesus took with those Pharisees just the very 
reverse course from that which He took with the other 


page thirty-seven 


group, and He tore their outside veils and coverings 
off them, and He revealed, behind all their camouflage 
of religion, a life which at the very heart and centre 
of it was unwholesome and corrupt! Jesus told those 
Pharisees very plainly to their faces on more than 
one occasion that, while they garbed themselves in 
the robes and the cloaks of religion, inside there 
was nothing to be found but pride and selfishness 
and cruelty and self-righteousness,—the things which, 
in the mind of Jesus, were the worst things in the 
world! So strongly did Jesus believe that to be true, 
that He once said to a group of Pharisees these most 
terrible words:—“The harlots shall go into the king- 
dom of God before you!”’ 

Just think of that—church people, church members, 
officers in the church of that time—and Jesus said to 
them, “Do you see those poor, miserable, poisonous 
off-scourings moving about our streets and byways? 
Well, they are nearer the kingdom of God than you 
are!’ That is a very significant fact. It is as if the Son 
of God would say to all of us, “If you want to be a 
sinner, be a sinner; if you want to be a selfish man, be 
a selfish man. Come out into the open places with 
your name upon your brow, so that all men will know 
what you are and what you strive to do. But the great- 
est enemy of goodness in the world, the greatest 
enemy of God, is the man who is unclean and who is 
selfish and who is proud in his heart, and who pro- 
fesses outside to be a leader, in the realms of morals 
and religion.” That is why Jesus spoke to the Phar- 
isees of His day in language which is unparalleled in 


page thirty-eight 


His own recorded utterances, and I think unparalleled 
anywhere else, in its fearful severity. 

If there is a publican or a harlot listening to me 
tonight, I want to say to you that Jesus Christ, by 
His love and by His holy purity, is able to give you 
back your purity and your self-respect and to set 
you again amongst clean and decent people in this 
community. But if there is a Pharisee here tonight, 
then I want to tell you that it is going to be a very 
difficult thing for you ever to get into the kingdom of 
God; because, in order to get even to the gate of the 
kingdom, you will have to strip yourself of all your 
pretense and you will have to allow God to take all 
that pride and all that selfishness and all that self- 
righteousness out of your soul! There is no room for 
that sort of thing in the streets of the heavenly king- 
dom! 

Those were the two great classes of evil in the time 
of Jesus; those are the two great classes of evil in any 
age,—the evil that goes about openly and makes no 
pretense of being anything else; and the evil which 
goes about masquerading as piety. We had in one of 
our songs tonight that wonderful parable of the Phar- 
isee and the publican. That poor publican didn’t say 
very much to God, did he? He just said, ““God, be 
merciful to me, a sinner.’”’ As I heard those words 
sung to us this evening I thought to myself that noth- 
ing in the world would do us more good than that 
everyone of us should bow our heads and bow our 
hearts before God tonight and say just those very 
same words. Let us get rid, in this quiet hour, 
of all pretense, of all hypocrisy, of all unreality; and 


page thirty-nine 


let us confess to God what we know in our souls to be 
true,—that we are all of us sinful men or sinful women; 
that there is none of us perfect yet. Let us cast our- 
selves upon the divine mercy, that we may be par- 
doned, and upon the divine grace, that we may be 
made strong. That is the teaching of Jesus. 

Let me sum the whole thing up in this one single 
sentence. Sin has its seat in the heart, but sometimes 
it comes out of the heart in manifest forms of evil, 
while at other times it remains in the heart doing its 
destructive and corroding work,—and this latter is 
the more dangerous of the two for the individual soul, 
according to the mind of Christ. What you and I have 
to do is to have these hearts of ours cleansed; we have 
got to have the springs of our life made sweet and 
clean, so that we may be like those good trees of which 
Jesus speaks in the passage that we read tonight, from 
which there grows nothing but good and wholesome 
and luscious fruit! That we shall have to study next 
Sunday evening. We couldn’t leave the matter here. 
Having studied what Jesus has to say about sin, next 
Sunday we shall study what Jesus said about the ways 
and the means through which we are to be delivered 
from its hateful power! 


page forty 


What Jesus Caught Concerning Salvation 


E have arrived at what I think everybody re- 
| gards as the very soul and centre of the teach- 
ing of Jesus. We have noticed more than once 





been regarded by the ives as the Saviour 
of men. The whole life of Jesus was somehow bound 
up with this matter of salvation; and if you were to 
take out of the gospel story, and out of the rest of 
the New Testament, every reference that there is to 
salvation, whether under that name or under some 
similar name,—everything relating to forgiveness, 
everything relating to reconciliation, everything re- 
lating to men being at peace with God, everything 
that relates to the new life that we may find in the 
fellowship of God,—if you were to take all that out 
of the New Testament, how much do you suppose 
would be left? That would be an excellent exercise 
for some of us some Sunday evening; or some other 
evening when we have an hour or two to spare,— 
just simply read through the New Testament and cut 
out everything in it that relates to the salvation of the 
lives of men. I believe you would be surprised to dis- 
cover what a poor, little page or two you would have 
left when you had finished. Christianity is a religion 
of salvation. It is, of course, a very bold and daring 
thing to try to discuss this great subject in one short 
evening; and yet there are some things that we sim- 


page forty-one 


ply must say about it, even if we can’t say all that 
should be said. 

If somebody were to ask you what, in your judg- 
ment, is the controlling idea of all the recorded teach- 
ing of Jesus, what would you say? I would say, the 
fatherhood of God. And of course, when we speak of 
the fatherhood of God, we instantly think of ourselves 
as God’s children; because the idea of God being a 
father is devoid of meaning unless we are His children, 
and this great double thought runs through all the 
teaching of Jesus in a way which completely controls 
that teaching. It is in relation to that great double 
idea that we are to set tonight this other idea of sal- 
vation. 

Last Sunday evening we discovered that, accord- 
ing to the mind of Jesus, there is no man in the world 
who is not a sinner; and by that I mean to say that 
there is not a single child of the heavenly Father 
who is really treating his Father properly. There is 
not one of us behaving as we ought to behave, when 
we remember that we are sons and daughters of the 
living God. And when Jesus stood in the world among 
those sinful people that were round about Him, He 
saw how badly and how thoughtlessly they were 
treating God,—some of them in ignorance and some 
of them in deliberate and persistent sin. And He saw 
those men and women restored to the Father’s friend- 
ship and to the precious service of the Father’s home; 
and the difference between the one state and the other 
is the meaning of salvation. And if you want to see 
the whole thing put into one perfect picture, all you 
have to do is to read over that familiar story in the 


page forty-two 


fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, the story of the 
Prodigal Son. When that son went back from the 
swine-troughs to his father’s beautiful house, that was 
salvation. 

Now then, let us be perfectly definite and perhaps 
a little personal this evening in connection with this 
serious matter. Here in this room at this moment 
there is a man who is not treating his heavenly Father 
properly; and by his ill treatment of his Father he 
has divorced himself for the time being from his 
Father’s home. Let us begin to watch that man, taking 
his homeward journey tonight. What a blessed thing 
it would be if he would take this journey! In order to 
help him back home, if I can, I am going to tell him 
the steps by which his salvation will be made a real 
perfect and beautiful thing; and the first step,—not 
according to my way of thinking, but according toJesus 
Christ’s—is repentance. There can be no salvation 
for the man who does not repent. What is repentance? 
Sometimes we are told that repentance is sorrow— 
sorrow for sin; but there is a great deal of sorrow for 
sin that is not repentance. You are sorry perhaps, 
some of you, for some sin you committed ten or 
fifteen or twenty years ago; but the meaning of that 
sorrow is, that you feel that, if you hadn’t committed 
that sin, you might be a richer or a happier man to- 
night than you are; and in all your sorrow there may 
be no thought of God. 

But the sorrow that makes repentance is the sorrow 
which comes to a man’s soul when he realizes that he 
has offered to God, as a service, as a reward for His 
great measureless love in Christ Jesus, nothing but 


page forty-three 


thoughtlessness, nothing but disobedience, nothing 
but shameful and deliberate sinfulness. Many and 
many a time that thought has gripped a man’s mind 
and a man’s conscience, sometimes as he has walked 
along the street, and sometimes as he has played and 
smiled with his friends,—the thought comes over him, 
“What a mess I have made of my life as a child of 
God! What business have I to offer a life like this to 
my heavenly Father?’ And when that man’s whole 
soul is filled with shame and sorrow for the way in 
which he has treated his Father in heaven, he is not 
far from salvation! 

Just think. Have you been treating God the way 
you ought to treat Him? Have you been the sort of 
son that you ought to have been in relation to this 
Father Who is in heaven? If not, what are you going 
to do about it? Do you feel any of this shame and 
sorrow tonight in your heart? Because, if you don’t, 
I am afraid there is little to be said to you; but 
if you do, then come you right back to God with 
nothing in your mind at all but just this shame and 
sorrow. That is all that God asks you to bring, and 
you are to bow before His face and say to Him, ‘“‘Oh, 
my Father, Iam sorry. That is all Ican say. Iam sorry. 
I am filled with shame and bitter pain at the way in 
which I have treated Thee.” And the teaching of Jesus 
is this—that the moment that man comes back to 
God with that sorrow in his heart and those words 
upon his lips, God forgives and restores him! 

Don’t you remember the parable? Why, before 
that son had half the story of his shame and sorrow 
out of his mouth, the father had stopped him and told 


page forty-four 


his servants to bring the robe and the ring and the 
shoes, and to kill the fatted calf and to make merry 
in the home, because this beloved son had come back. 
There is that sort of a welcome waiting for the sinful 
man in this meeting tonight, just so soon as, with 
shame and sorrow in his soul, he comes back to God! 
That is the second element in salvation—restoration 
—restoration to the sense of God’s precious smile; 
restoration to the sense that God is no longer against 
us, as He always is against sin in every form; but 
that God is on our side, that we are once more children 
in the Father’s home! That is what I mean by restora- 
tion, and we can be assured that, once this evil of 
the past is forgiven, it is absolutely and utterly blotted 
out from the very memory of the Father. 

Did you ever think of it? God is the only father in 
the universe who can forget when He forgives! No 
other father can do that. There may be a father here 
tonight whose son sometime in the distant past 
treated him badly, treated him with callous indiffer- 
ence, or perhaps even with deliberate cruelty; and 
long, long since, the whole thing has been forgiven 
and you and your son are on the best possible terms 
today. But have you forgotten? I don’t believe you 
have; I don’t believe you can forget. It sticks there,— 
the memory of those hateful days when you and your 
son were at bitter enmity, because of the way he 
treated you, his father. But God, when He forgives 
us, forgets as well, and never again will He bring up 
those evil things of the past, but He has blotted them 
out forever! 


page forty-five 


Just before we pass on from that, let us stay a 
moment. It is all very well to say that God forgives 
and forgets; but what about those people on the earth 
who have been the objects of my sinful behavior? 
We have done our injuries to God through our fellow 
creatures. Men and women have been the victims of 
our sin; and if God is willing to forgive and able to 
forget, what about these men and women living near 
us in the world? We have done them grievous injury. 
What about it? There is this about it—that Jesus 
teaches, just as plainly as He teaches anything, that 
repentance is always bound up with restitution, 
where restitution is possible. | 

I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing for some of 
us to make this Christmas season a very blessed time 
for ourselves and for our neighbors, by making resti- 
tution. Is there someone in this city that you have 
wronged? Is there someone in this city that you are 
wronging daily? Is there someone in this city who is 
at enmity with you because of your evil treatment of 
him? Wouldn’t it be a very great and blessed thing 
if you would go to that man before Christmas,— 
walk into his office or into his house, and tell him 
that you have come to make restitution? Or if the 
wrong you did that man was of such a kind that you 
cannot make restitution, then you go to that man 
just the same and ask him to forgive you. Tell him, 
just as you tell God, that you are sorry for what you 
have done; and I believe that if you do that, that 
man will spring off his chair and hold out his hand to 
you, and your enmity will be forgotten and you will 
be better friends than ever, beginning with this very 


page forty-six ° 


week before Christmas! That would be a splendid 
thing if somebody would do that after we leave this 
service tonight. 

But I have a word, just one word, for the man that 
has been wronged. When we receive injuries from 
other people, we sometimes make it very hard for 
them to come and ask to be forgiven; we just make 
ourselves as cold as we can; and when we see this fellow 
coming along the street towards us, we cross the street 
so that we won’t have to meet him or speak to him. 
We will make no approach; we will make it as hard 
as we can for him to admit that he is wrong and ask 
to be forgiven. That is not the way God does with us. 
While we were yet sinners, Christ died for the un- 
godly. God in Christ Jesus came and begged of us to 
be reconciled with Himself; and wouldn’t it be a 
good thing if some of those of you who have suffered 
injury from your neighbor, were to take the initiative 
in this matter? Instead of waiting for that sinful man 
to come to your house, you go to his house and ask 
him whether this trouble that is between you can 
not be blotted out, the way that God blots out our 
sins from the book of His remembrance? Take that 
man by the hand and say, “I am willing to forgive 
you if you are willing to be a friend of mine again. 
Let us blot it all out and let us live as children of the 
blessed Father ought to live; so that I, who have 
done the wrong will try to make restitution to you, 
and you to whom the wrong has been done, will come 
half way, or more than half way, to meet me and will 
make the matter of restitution easier and more prec- 
ious all round,—just the way that Jesus makes this 


page forty-seven 


whole matter of repentance and forgiveness so much 
easier, by coming the whole way to meet us. 

That isn’t all. I have yet to say the two best things 
in connection with this matter of salvation, and the 
first is this:—When you get back into the holy fellow- 
ship of your Father in heaven, and feel that these 
clouds are blotted out from between you,—you will 
find in that restored fellowship a pledge and a promise 
of the most wonderful thing possible to men, namely, 
absolute victory over evil! It is a humiliating truth, 
that even those in this building tonight who have 
lived the Christian life the longest and the deepest, 
are constantly doing things outwardly and inwardly 
which are vexing our heavenly Father. Not the best 
man among us is a perfect man yet; but the teaching 
of Jesus is, that we are going to be perfect some day 
through the fellowship and the love of God; and what 
a wonderful gospel that is! Some day, out of these 
lives of ours, out of the life of every man who will 
come penitently to God to be forgiven, every vestige, 
every root of sin, is to be torn and thrown away, and 
we are going to be like Jesus; and when all sin has 
been taken away and when our lives are like the life 
of Jesus, that is salvation! Some of us, many of us, I 
hope, are being saved now through this love of God 
in Jesus Christ our Lord; but none of us is wholly 
saved. Sin is still there and some day we are going to 
be saved utterly, because He is able to save to the 
uttermost! 

And the other thing that I want to say is this:— 
That when we find in the love of God our salvation 
from sin, we are going to find in that same love our 


page forty-eight 


4 


salvation from some other things as well. When I 
come so close to the loving heart of God as to see in 
my own experience that He so loves my life that He 
is willing to go any length that it may be redeemed, 
—even the length of manifesting Himself to me in the 
life and in the death of Jesus Christ His Son,—then 
I am going to draw this inference,—that no evil thing 
can ever come to my life from the hand of God! And 
from that moment I am saved from all fear and I am 
saved from all fretting; and no matter what happens 
round about me, no matter what the pains and the 
sorrows and the disappointments of life may be, I 
now know that the biggest thing, the central thing, 
in all the universe, is that divine love which received 
me back after I had sinned so long and so deliberately 
against it; and with that love I feel that I am saved 
utterly. 

That is the secret of what, in the New Testament, 
is called the “‘peace of God which passes understand- 
ing.’ The man who knows the power of God’s love is 
a man from whose soul all fear and all misgiving and 
all doubts about the providential order, are banished 
forevermore! That is the sort of salvation that we 
covet for every man here who hasn’t got it tonight; 
and we may have it, we may begin to have it now, 
if only we will take the first step,—and the first step, 
as I said in the beginning, is to come just as we are 
to the heavenly Father’s feet and say to Him, “Oh 
God, Thou God and Father of Jesus Christ, my Lord, 
I am sorry!” Then, as Jesus Himself put it, there will 
be joy in the presence of the angels of God. 


page forty-nine 


What Jesus Caught Concerning the 
Hileaning of Greatness 


ac |ERHAPS there is no word that enters more 
frequently into our common conversation 
than the word “‘great’’. Just you listen tomor- 
row in talking with your friends, and, if you 

~~. | can, count the number of times that you hear 
this word “great” in the course of the day. We talk 
about a great speech, or a great game, or a great joke, 
or a great gift, or a great man. I suppose it is not 
really unfair to suggest that we use that word very 
often without thinking of what it means, or of what 
it ought to mean, just as the great majority of us use 
lots of words without thinking of their true signifi- 
cance. But suppose that someone were to challenge 
you tomorrow and suppose he were to stop you right 
in the middle of your talk, if you had used that word, 
and should say to you, ““What exactly do you mean 
by ‘great’? For example, you spoke a moment ago 
about a great man. What precisely did you mean?” 
Suppose he went further than that and said to you, 
“IT would like to know just for the sake of curiosity 
what man you regard as the greatest man in all the 
world today?” 

Well, you would have to stop and think. I don’t 
suppose anybody would be willing to answer that 
question off-hand; but this at least is certain, that 
the answer that you would give to that kind of ques- 





page fifty 


tion would depend altogether on the standard by 
which, in your own mind, greatness among men is 
measured. It may, for instance, be your opinion that 
the greatness of a man ought to be measured by his 
wealth. Then you would try to discover who is the 
richest man in the world. I think I saw a photograph 
of him in the paper the other day. And you would 
draw the inference that he must be the greatest man 
on earth, because he has more money than any other 
man, so far as others have given us insight into their 
private possessions. Or a man’s greatness might be 
measured by the amount of power which he has or 
which he uses, and you would begin to wonder who 
is the most powerful man in the world. You might 
think perhaps of some employer of labor, or of some 
statesman or monarch, and that would be your answer 
to the question. You might, however, take a different 
point of view altogether and you might say, “In my 
opinion a man’s greatness is to be measured wholly 
by his wisdom.” Then you would begin to wonder 
within yourself who is the wisest man on earth? The 
deepest thinker? The man who has secured the largest 
grasp of the truth? And perhaps you might mention 
the name of some illustrious scientist. 

These answers would all be very interesting, but 
it is much more interesting to learn from the New 
Testament that that very question was put to Jesus 
two thousand years ago, and one day, as He stood 
among His friends, one of them asked Jesus: ““Whom 
do you consider to be the greatest?” In the answer 
that Jesus gave to that question we find ourselves, 
as it seems to me, pretty near the very heart of His 


page fifty-one 


teaching, because it is not possible to deny that, in 
the answer which Jesus gave to that question, He 
made a contribution to human thought that had never 
been made before. In other words, the answer to that 
question, as it fell from the lips of Jesus, contains one 
of the essential elements of what we regard as a Chris- 
tian philosophy of life. Now, I am very sorry to say— 
because I am afraid it may hurt your feelings a little 
—that, according to the mind of Jesus, all the answers 
proposed to the question a moment ago, are wrong. 
According to Jesus a man’s wealth has no relation 
whatsoever to that man’s greatness, except this— 
that Jesus one day did say, in the most explicit fashion, 
that it is an exceedingly difficult thing for a rich man 
ever to become a great man; and according to the 
mind of Jesus, the power that a man exercises over 
his fellow creatures, has nothing whatever to do with 
his greatness. Sometimes great power has been pos- 
sessed and used by some of the worst men in history, 
—by the Emperor Nero, for example. You could not 
imagine Jesus admitting that the Emperor Nero was 
a great man. And when Jesus discusses this subject 
of greatness, He doesn’t say one word about wisdom, 
either. The most wonderful scholar in the world, the 
most famous scientist that ever lived, may turn out 
to be, or to have been, a man who, in the judgment 
of Jesus, does not deserve the name of great. If these 
answers are all wrong, according to Jesus, what is the 
right answer? What is His answer? 

In the first place, the foundation of all greatness, 
according to the mind of Jesus, is a man’s love to God. 
If you can point to a man in whose life there is no love 


page fifty-two 


to God, then he may be a great scholar or he may be 
a great ruler or he may be a great financier,—but it 
is untrue to say that he is a great man. The kind of 
character which Jesus regards as great can not be 
builded up at all, can not even begin to be builded up, 
until there has been laid the foundation of a deep, in- 
telligent, passionate love of God. That is the first 
thing of all. 

Out of that love to God, however, there arises in 
the life of men a quality upon which Jesus first, among 
all the teachers of the world, set the stamp and name 
of greatness and what do you think that quality was? 
Humility! In the Christian system of virtues, humility 
is one of the greatest and most shining of all, and the 
meaning of the place that Jesus gave to this modest 
virtue, is this: When a man begins to think of the stu- 
pendous truth that God loves him, it seems to that 
man always and inevitably the most wonderful thing 
in the world, that God—whom it is impossible for us 
truly even to think of, whose greatness is beyond our 
imaginations, whose holiness can not be put into our 
common human language—that that God should call 
him into His service! What a marvellous thing it is 
that God should ask me to serve Him! If God wants 
my service, I don’t care how simple or how lowly or 
how mean the service may seem to be, I will rejoice 
in the great and glorious privilege of doing it for Him. 
That is the meaning of humility in the service of our 
Father who is in heaven. It is so great a privilege to 
serve Him at all that the very lowliest service that 
He asks us for, fills our lives with joy and gladness, 
and we are only too eager to give it. 


page fifty-three 


At the same time, this love to God and this humility 
in His service, both manifest themselves in our rela- 
tions with our fellows. You can not love God and hate 
your brother; and you can not serve God while refus- 
ing all the time to serve your brethren; and so this 
humility in the mind of the man that Jesus would 
describe as being great, takes the form of willingness 
to serve the very humblest and the very lowliest of 
his fellows, in the meanest and the lowliest way. 

You see, poor James and John, in that New Testa- 
ment story, were anxious to serve God in conspicuous 
ways; they wanted to occupy places which would be so 
glorious that all men would speak about them, talk 
about the service they were rendering; realize what 
wonderful men James and John must be; and as Jesus 
thought over that situation in their minds, He said 
to them one day: “Do you know what is wrong with 
you? What is wrong with you is, that you need to be 
converted. You need to be turned right around and to 
look and move in the opposite direction.” That is a 
startling thing, that Jesus should say to men who had 
lived in His company and His fellowship for years, 
that they were not yet converted? I dare say that is 
true of many of us who have lived in the company 
and fellowship of Jesus for years, members of churches, 
professing Christian men and women; and yet if we 
realized our own minds tonight we would have to 
admit that we have not yet begun to take the point 
of view of Jesus with regard to the true greatness of 
life. We measure our lives and our success in terms 
of money or in terms of power or in terms of something 
else which is absolutely scorned and rejected by Jesus 


page fifty-four 


as a standard and measure of greatness! What we 
have to realize is, that there can be no greatness of 
life for us until, out of a consuming love to God, there 
rises a passionate love for our fellow men; and until 
that love to God and men is able and willing to take 
the form of the lowliest service in the world! 

More than that, this humble man of whom the Lord 
is speaking to us in this study, is one who never looks 
for any sort of reward save only the boundless joy 
that he derives from the service itself. That is another 
remarkable thing. There are lots of men who would 
be willing to render even lowly and menial services 
to their fellows, provided they would be paid enough 
for doing it. But the humble man, the man whose 
humility is the fruit of a great love, never thinks of 
pay or of reward, either from his fellow men or from 
his Father who is in heaven. He loves to serve God 
and his fellows! 

If we take this teaching of Jesus and apply it to our 
original question, what do you think the result would 
be? Suppose we were to put the question thus:— 
Who of all the men in the world today is, according 
to the standard of Jesus, the greatest man? Of course, 
we have to confess that that is a question that we 
have no power and that we have no right to answer. 
But this I will say,—that if Jesus Christ were to come 
visibly into our midst now and to give us the true 
answer to that question, I believe that the name that 
Jesus would utter would surprise every man and every 
woman in this building! Because I believe it would 
be a name that none of us ever heard before. It may 
be some simple quiet saint in some far-off cottage in 


page fifty-five 


the Middle West prairies, who lives there day by day 
serving his God and his fellows, with a great love; 
doing all he can and passionately desiring that he 
could do more, for the spiritual enrichment and up- 
lifting and upbuilding of other lives. It may be some 
missionary of the cross of Christ who, having turned 
his back on home and native land and every sort of 
social advantage and advancement, has gone down 
into the islands of the ocean or into the wilds of Asia 
or of Africa, with no object, no purpose in view, but 
simply to serve the Lord he loves and to serve the 
men and women round about him in their darkness. 

I do not know, but it is wonderful to think that it 
is possible for all of us to be great, in Jesus Christ’s 
sense of the term. Most of us can never be great men 
in the world’s sense of the term; we haven’t enough 
money, we haven’t enough power, we haven’t enough 
learning, we are deficient in something or another. 
But if we love God and if out of that love there comes 
a service, humble yet glowing and passionate, a service 
of Him and of the people around us,—we shall graduate 
in Christ’s school of greatness, and although our ma- 
terial reward may be nothing or small, we shall have 
a crown of which no power on earth or out of the 
earth shall ever be able to rob us! 


page fifty-six 


What Jesus Caught Concerning 
His Oon Death 


max_ |VERY reader of the New Testament, even 
+! the most careless and casual, must have been 
struck by the fact that there is no other event 
in the career of Jesus which is described with 
t the fulness of detail which characterizes every 
one of the four accounts of His crucifixion. From that 
fact we would be, I think, entitled to infer, even if we 
did not otherwise know it to be true, that the death 
of Jesus was a matter of supreme interest and import- 
ance to the mind of the early church. What gave its 
interest and importance to the death of Jesus? How 
did men come to believe concerning the death of 
Jesus, the perfectly tremendous things that they did 
come to believe about it? We have only to open some 
of the letters of the Apostle Paul, or to linger for a 
moment among the pages of the Acts of the Apostles, 
to discover that it was the belief of the early Christian 
church,—I think I'am not wrong when I say the uni- 
versal belief of that church,—that the death of Jesus 
had both for God and for men an importance which 
had never belonged before and which would never 
belong again to any other event in human history. 

Of course, we are, some of us, familiar with the view 
that all this idea about the saving power of the cross 
of Jesus, was invented, and that it was invented chiefly 
by the Apostle Paul. The most serious objection which 





page fifty-seven 


can be brought against that view, is that the Apostle 
Paul himself explicitly states that he did not invent 
the early church’s conception of the meaning of the 
death of Jesus; for we are all of us, or most of us at any 
rate, familiar with the passage which begins with these 
words: “I received what I delivered unto you, how 
Jesus died for our sins’’; by which of course he plainly 
means that this conception of the meaning of the 
death of Jesus, was something which had been handed 
on to him by those who had been Christians before 
him. In other words, even at the stage of Christian 
history which preceded the conversion of Paul, the 
Christian church was sure that it was right in inter- 
preting the death of Jesus as it did always interpret 
it. Whence came the assurance of the church? It seems 
to me that there is only one reasonable answer to that 
question and it is this: That the church’s idea of the 
redeeming value of the death of Jesus, and the church’s 
assurance that it was right in entertaining and in 
propagating that idea, came from Jesus Himself. In 
other words, Jesus Christ, in the course of His earthly 
ministry, had introduced His friends to this stupen- 
dous conception of the meaning of His own death, with 
which we are all very familiar, and yet with which 
none of us is familiar enough. 

As a matter of fact, when we read the recorded 
teaching of Jesus, we learn first of all, that at a com- 
paratively early stage in His ministry He began to 
speak to His friends about His death; but the way in 
which He spoke about it had this very startling 
characteristic,—that He gave His friends to under- 
stand that when He came to die, He would not die, 


page fifty-eight 


as we say, naturally, but He would die by violent 
means. In other words, He told His disciples to ex- 
pect not so much that He would die, as that He would 
be put to death. It was very difficult for those who 
loved Jesus to accustom themselves to that declara- 
tion or even to accept it as true; and so, very patiently 
and very insistently Jesus mentioned the grave matter 
once and again and again; but when the end of His 
ministry drew near He took them,—if we may use 
such an expression,—more deeply into His confidence 
and He tried to show them how this death that He 
was about to die, was not to be a fate thrust upon Him 
by wicked men, but the very destiny for the fulfilling 
of which He had come into the world. Jesus tried to 
convince His disciples that His death was to be, not 
only from the point of view of those who would ob- 
serve it, a tragedy, but also, from His point of view 
and God’s, a willing and determined sacrifice. 

There are especially two passages in the recorded 
utterances of Jesus which bring us very intimately 
into contact with His mind on this holy subject. The 
first is closely connected with the experience of Jesus 
and His disciples which we were studying last Sunday 
evening. You remember they were discussing once 
with one another, what was the meaning of greatness 
and who among them was the greatest; and in the 
course of that very solemn conversation, Jesus said to 
His disciples, “Even the Son of Man came not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life 
a ransom for many.” You see what the meaning of 
that statement must have been in the mind of Jesus. 
I do not mean for one moment to be so presumptuous 


page fifty-nine 


as to say that you or I or any Christian man can see 
quite to the depths and grasp the whole significance 
of that utterance of Jesus; but I do most emphati- 
cally mean to say that there are elements in its mean- 
ing which Jesus never intended any of us to miss, and 
first of all, as I have already hinted, Jesus here ex- 
plicitly states that He came into the world for the 
purpose of giving up His life. 

In the second place, He teaches that in the giving 
up of His life, He would deal with the souls of men as 
some great benefactor might deal with men imprisoned 
and enslaved, if he should pay the price of their de- 
liverance and set them forever free. “‘“My life’, He 
says, “is to be the ransom. I am to pay the price which 
will enable men to enter into freedom out of the bond- 
age of their sins.”” Whatever may be the full and final 
interpretation of that, it seems to me that Jesus can 
not have meant less than this when He uttered those 
unspeakably solemn words. 

And the other passage which must be described as 
essential, or rather, the group of passages, is that 
group in which Jesus founds what we know now in the 
Christian church as the Lord’s Supper. In the course 
of that eventful evening, the most eventful in the his- 
tory of the world, perhaps,—you remember how Jesus 
took bread and broke it and gave to His disciples and 
said to them, ““Take, eat; this is (in symbol, in picture, 
in parable), my body, my flesh.” And after they had 
eaten the bread, He took the cup also and said, ‘“This 
cup is the new covenant in my blood.’ What does 
that mean? What did Jesus mean by the new cove- 
nant? He was thinking, as it seems to me, of that great 


page sixty 


passage in the Book of Jeremiah wherein that mighty 
prophet had foretold a day when God would come 
among His people and would establish among them a 
new covenant, which would take the place of the old 
covenant of Sinai, the very essence and centre of which 
covenant would be an undertaking on the part of God 
to forgive and blot out the sins of all His people. 
“This”, says Jesus, “is my blood of the new cove- 
nant, shed for many for the remission of sins.’ Jesus 
directly relates His own death to God’s forgiveness 
of the sins of men. 

It seems to me that there is no escape from that. 
We may agree with it, or we may not agree with it. 
We may regard it as the greatest and the most solemn 
and the most profound thing ever uttered by the lips 
of man, or we may regard it as something with which 
we men of the Twentieth Century have nothing 
whatever to do; but it stands as a fact. that this and 
nothing less than this, is what Jesus taught as the 
meaning and significance of His own death; that by 
His death forgiveness of sins was to come into the 
lives of men and that men were to be delivered from 
the bondage of evil and brought into the glorious 
liberty of the Sons of God! 

Of course, there are some of us who are perfectly 
willing to accept that as the true interpretation of 
the cross, simply on the ground that it was taught by 
Jesus Himself. Others, however, probably would like 
a little corroboration for so stupendous a conception 
and that corroboration I am prepared to give you 
now,—corroboration, namely, from history and from 
experience. First of all, the man who takes this view 


page sixty-one 


of the meaning of the death of Jesus finds, inevitably 
and invariably, new tides of moral power flowing into 
and through his life, and by the side of those moral 
streams there begin also to flow no less cleansing 
streams of uttermost hatred for sin in all its forms. 

Is there a man here tonight who loves sin and who 
is playing with it from day to day and who is allowing 
it to poison the springs of his life? Well then, I don’t 
know much about you, but there is one thing I do 
know, and that is, that you have never seriously 
taken the point of view of Jesus with regard to the 
meaning of His Cross; because if you had, you would 
hate sin. 

It is almost to put the same thing in other 
words, when I say further that every great historic 
revival of religion in the history of Christianity, has 
been associated with the preaching of this interpreta- 
tion of the cross. Did you ever know of a revival of 
religion which occurred in association with a preacher 
who didn’t know what to believe about Jesus, or who 
didn’t think there was any particular significance 
about His death? I do not wish myself to speak scorn- 
fully of the beliefs of any man; but I am bound to say 
that I have never read or heard of such a revival of 
religion. Sometimes we wonder why there is no great 
revival in our own day. I believe that before we can 
have a revival, both preachers and hearers will have 
to come to believe more deeply and radiantly than 
many of us at this present moment do, in Christ’s 
interpretation of His own death. That is what I be- 
lieve. 


page sixty-two 


Once more, did you ever hear of any mighty mis- 
sion or of any powerful missionary society that was 
ever born elsewhere than at the cross, as interpreted 
by Jesus? Do you know anything about the history of 
religious and missionary societies? I am sure many 
of you know a great deal about them, and will cor- 
roborate me when [ say that the passion with which 
those societies and those individuals went into the 
ends of the earth to be the instruments of the redemp- 
tion of our fellows, was a passion which was born in 
them at the cross of Christ, interpreted as God’s un- 
speakable and immeasurable gift to mankind. 

And finally, is it not true that it is at the cross, as 
interpreted by Jesus, that men have come to believe 
without the possibility of any subsequent misgiving, 
in the love of God? Do you think that men would ever 
have come to believe thus in the love of God, if it 
hadn’t been for the redeeming death of Jesus? If you 
don’t believe in the redeeming death of Jesus now, 
I want to ask you if you are absolutely sure in your 
own mind of the love of God; and if you are, I want 
to ask you, why? Is there any absolute demonstra- 
tion in history that God Almighty loves men, apart 
from the awful demonstration of the cross? I am my- 
self not sure that there is. There is a great deal of 
pious thinking about the love of God, a great deal of 
able and intellectual speculation concerning it; but 
absolute assurance I know not where to find, save at 
the cross of Him Who loves me and gave Himself for 
me! In other words, history and Christian experience 
conspire to corroborate the teaching of Jesus about 
His own death. Do you think that if that interpreta- 


page sixty-three 


tion was altogether false and mistaken, these glorious 
and triumphant results could have flowed from the 
men and women and groups, transformed into the 
likeness of the Son of God, through a passionate and 
unspeakable gratitude to Jesus for something that 
He really never did at all? Is that a possible thing to 
believe? 

But if, by the testimony of Jesus supported by the 
glad and glorious testimony of a thousand thousand 
saints throughout the world, as well as thousands and 
thousands more in the heavenly places, we are to 
accept this view of the death of Jesus as true,—what 
then? Is there anything that we are expected to do or 
that we are bound to do as a result of taking that view 
of the death of Jesus,—that for my redemption and the 
redemption of all mankind, He deliberately laid down 
His life? There is only one thing that any of us can do: 


‘Just as I am, without one plea, 
But that Thy blood was shed for me, 
And that thou bid’st me come to thee, 
O, Lamb of God, I come!” 


That’s all. 


page sixty-four 


What Jesus Caught Concerning Prayer 


\S|OME of you, I am afraid, are thinking that 

: ‘ this is not a very suitable subject for the Sun- 
p74) day evening before Christmas, and if that is 
*: : what you are thinking, I am very sorry; be- 
| cause I will have to disagree with you. What- 
ever we may think about Christmas, I know, and I 
suppose some of you know, very much to your cost, 
what the children think about it. A Christmas without 
any presents would be a poor sort of a Christmas for 
a child. I have no hesitation in saying that the very 
best present that it is possible for God to receive, is 
the simple, humble, believing prayer of a man or a 
woman or of a child who loves Him. And when we are 
thinking in these days of the gifts that we are giving 
to one another and by which we try to express our 
love or our admiration, let us remember this,—that 
God, the eternal Father of us all, is constantly ex- 
pecting gifts from us; and the best gift, far and away 
the best, that we can ever give Him, is to bow before 
His holy face and offer our prayers. 

Of course, there are some people who don’t believe 
in prayer,—very clever people who tell us that prayer 
is no use, partly because God is so good that He gives 
us the very best things that He can give us, whether 
we pray or not; and partly because God is so wise 
that it is mere foolishness on our part to tell Him 
what He ought to do; therefore, prayer is meaningless, 





page sixty-five 


and if it is meaningless, it is of course valueless; there- 
fore, these clever people do not pray any more. 

Some years ago, ten years perhaps, I sat in a meeting 
such as this in a small South African town, and I 
listened to a sermon preached by one of the greatest 
Christian men that ever lived in Africa. His name 
was Andrew Murray, and I am quite sure that that 
name is familiar to some of you. Andrew Murray at 
that time was so old and weak that, instead of standing 
on the platform, he sat on a chair. The text that he 
chose was this: “Alone, praying.’’ You will remember 
how we are told in the New Testament that on one 
occasion Jesus was away in a solitary place, alone, 
praying; and as long as I live, I shall never forget the 
sermon that that aged saint preached upon that text, 
because he told us something of the significance that 
prayer assumes in the mind of a man who is prepared 
to study carefully the place that prayer occupied in 
the life of Jesus. 

You will remember that, in one of our earlier studies, 
we learned that the deepest of all the ideas, the con- 
trolling idea in the teaching of Jesus, is that of the 
fatherhood of God. It would be strange, would it not, 
if the fatherhood of God should be the deepest truth 
in the world, while on the other hand, it should prove 
to be a useless and a foolish thing to pray? Because 
what, after all, is prayer, but just children talking to 
their father? If it is true that God is our Father, then 
prayer is the most natural thing in the world; and 
when we say that something is the most natural thing 
in the world, what do we mean? What do we mean 
when we say that it is the most natural thing in the 


page sixty-six 


world for us to breathe or to eat? We mean by saying 
that, that when you breathe or when you eat, you 
are really responding to a vital, deep-seated necessity 
of your nature. If you ceased to breathe or if you 
ceased to eat, how long do you suppose you would 
live? And when it is said that prayer is the most 
natural thing in the world, what is meant is, that 
prayer is an absolute necessity, if we are to live the 
sort of life that God, our Father, expects us to live. 
It is, therefore, not surprising to find that, in the life 
of Jesus Himself, prayer occupied not only a large 
place, but a most vital and commanding place. You 
just glance through the story of the life of Jesus again 
when you have time, and see for yourself how, again 
and again and again, sometimes for a whole night, 
Jesus goes away by Himself and prays to His Father 
in heaven. And it is as plainly written across the life 
of Jesus as anything that is written there, that He 
believed, that He felt sure, that life would be an im- 
possible thing to Him without this communion with 
His heavenly Father! It was natural with Jesus to 
pray, just because in His prayer He expressed one of 
the profoundest necessities of His being. 

Let us remember that from that fact we are entitled, 
in fact, we are compelled, to draw one or two very im- 
portant inferences, and the first of them is this:—The 
prayer life of Jesus was associated, as we saw some 
evenings ago, with the deepest knowledge of God 
that has ever been possessed by anyone in the whole 
history of the human race. If, for Jesus, with His su- 
preme knowledge of God, it was a natural and a neces- 
sary thing to pray, who are we, with our poor shallow 


page sixty-seven 


knowledge of God,—as the knowledge of the very best 
and wisest of us is poor and shallow compared with 
His,—to rise up and say that it is quite useless and 
foolish to pray? From the prayer life of Jesus we draw 
an inference which is forever valid to the mind of the 
man who believes in Jesus, and that is, that prayer 
must have a central place in every Christian life! | 

Then there is another. Not only was this prayer 
life of Jesus bound up with His perfect knowledge of 
God, but the prayer life of Jesus was bound up with 
something else which we noted on a former occasion, 
namely, with the absolutely sinless character of Jesus 
Himself. That is an interesting thing, isn’t it? Are 
you a sinless man? Have you overcome every last 
element of evil in your nature? Are you free from sin, 
in thought and word and deed? If you are, then I for 
one am prepared to listen to you and to give some 
weight to your judgment, when you come and tell me 
that, from day to day in your sinless experience, you 
find it fruitless and valueless to pray. But if you are 
a sinner, like myself, striving every day against 
temptation and day by day being laid by the heels in 
the dust,—then I say to you that I attribute no value 
to your word when you tell me that you do not 
believe in prayer. And when I think of the life of 
Jesus, free from sin and filled with prayer,—because 
I believe that these two qualities of the life of Jesus 
were very far from being unrelated,—I believe that 
the strength and the beauty and the glory of the life 
of Jesus were there, because of the communion which 
He held so constantly with His Father! 


page sixty-eight 


We find Jesus offering to God prayers of thanks- 
giving. We read in the New Testament that from 
time to time Jesus would stand among His friends and 
sometimes among His enemies, too, and lift up His 
eyes to heaven and say, “I thank Thee, O Father.” 
Only the other day I was reading something that had 
been written by a great English preacher, and what 
do you think that preacher suggested? He suggested 
that men and women in our day are becoming less 
and less sensible of what they owe to God, and that 
in our Christian lives there is far too little expression 
of gratitude to God. Oh, let us remind ourselves at 
this Christmas season of the boundless loving-kind- 
ness of our Father Who is in heaven! And in the midst 
of our joy, let us take a few moments, as we look 
around our homes and the homes of our friends, and 
see them filled with joy and with every good thing, 
and as we see the homes that have been filled with 
sorrow, touched with a kind of heavenly joy in the 
assurance that God gives to His disconsolate children, 
—let us spare a moment to raise our eyes to heaven 
and say, after the manner of Jesus Christ our Master, 
“T thank Thee, O Father!’ What a dreadful thing it 
is to think that we should ever cease to be grateful to 
God; and if we are grateful, let us express it! 

Sometimes we hear people say of a certain kind of 
a man, “Oh, he is very grateful for all that you do for 
him, but he doesn’t like to say anything about it.” 
I think that is a poor sort of man. If somebody has 
shown you loving-kindness in your own life, in your 
business affairs, wherever it is,—it seems to me that 
it is your bounden duty as a decent citizen, to say 


page sixty-nine 


nothing of your character as a Christian gentleman, 
to express your gratitude for the good thing that has 
been given to you or done for you. And so it is with 
God. Let us take greater delight in expressing our 
gratitude to God, Who is the giver of every good and 
perfect gift. 

In the second place, we find Jesus asking God in 
His prayers for different things for Himself. Oh, yes, 
Jesus believed in petitionary prayer. Go with Jesus, 
after you have taken your shoes off your feet, into the 
garden of Gethsemane, and there you will learn, be- 
fore His face, the most awful lesson that the world was 
ever taught in this matter of petitionary prayer. Jesus 
prayed to God that day the most dreadful petitionary 
prayer that was ever prayed—“‘TIf it be possible, let 
this cup pass from me.” Jesus believed in petition 
and, because He believed in it, we have a right to 
believe in it also. Sometimes we are afraid to offer 
God our petitions, in case He won’t grant the things 
we ask for. It is none of our business. Do you remem- 
ber, in this awful petition of Jesus, how He said, ‘‘Yet 
not my will, but thine, be done’? Tell God what you 
want. Spread before Him all the passionate desire of 
your soul and then leave it to Him. But if we are to 
argue from the fact that we are not sure whether God 
will give us what we ask, that we ought not to ask for 
anything, then we are getting pretty near to the po- 
sition of a man who would say that a child really has 
no right to ask his father for anything. If there is any 
father in this room tonight whose child has not asked 
him the last few days for a great many things. I would 
like to know that child’s name and nature, because I 


page seventy 


suppose most fathers are deeply troubled because of 
the things that the child wants, and is not going to 
get. But that is not going to do him any harm, because 
when he gets what he is going to get, he will be so 
pleased that he will forget about the other things he 
wanted. 

That is the way with us. God is going to give us 
great good gifts in answer to our waiting, faithful 
prayers. But it is our duty to ask, to talk about the 
desires of our soul with this Father Who is in heaven, 
and I hope that in your prayers, as well as gratitude, 
there will be petition; and as the years go on, our 
petitions will become wiser and wiser, just as your 
children, as they grow up from year to year, will grow 
wiser and wiser in the things they ask for at Christ- 
mas or any other time. 

The third thing we notice in the prayers of Jesus is, 
that He spoke to God constantly about the needs of 
other people. Jesus had the whole world in its dread- 
ful neediness always in his imagination, and He used 
to pray to God for the men and the women and the 
little children of the world. In other words, Jesus be- 
lieved in and practised intercessory prayer. That is 
another difficulty some of us have, and perhaps some 
of us say to ourselves, “If I pray for myself, maybe it 
will do some good; but what good are my prayers for 
another man?” The simple truth of the matter is, that 
the history of the world is filled with instances of men 
and women who have been encouraged, strengthened, 
sent on their ways rejoicing, of men and women who, 
in not a few cases, have had their lives wholly changed, 
by the prayers of someone else. 


page seventy-one 


In the slums of the city of London, there was a 
wretched little boy who was rapidly dying of disease, 
but he had learned to know God and to love Christ; 
and in the same tumble-down tenement there lived a 
drunken cab driver, but the drunken cab driver had 
a tender heart; and from time to time, when he came 
in from his weary days in the streets of London, he 
would go into the suffering boy’s room and talk with 
him a little while, sometimes bringing him simple 
gifts. The poor boy’s heart was broken because his 
friend was so drunken, and one night, as the cab 
driver stumbled up the rickety old stairs, he heard the 
boy talking. When he got to the door, he found the 
little fellow kneeling in his bed, praying to God, and 
what he was saying was this: “Oh God, don’t let this 
dear friend of mine get drunk any more. I love him so 
much that I don’t want him to be a man like that.” 
The old cab driver waited until the boy was finished, 
then went in and sat by his bed. He said to him, ““Do 
you really love a poor old waif like me?” The boy said, 
“Yes, I love you; but you are not a waif; you are a 
man.” And the cab driver went away to his bed and 
thought things over. Soon the boy died. And as that 
old man sat in his cab in the streets of London, he 
thought of that face and that little prayer, and the 
result was that he was absolutely won to God, and 
cleanness and decency of living; and the beginning of 
it was the prayer of a little child in the slums of Lon- 
don! 

Let no man ever dare to say that intercessory prayer 
counts for nothing in the world. If Jesus believed 
that, do you think He would have interceded for His 


page seventy-two 


friends on earth? Do you think He would ever live 
to make intercession for us, if He believed there was 
no use? Listen to me. I don’t want to be too dogmatic 
and I don’t want to thrust my notions of great, big, 
deep, difficult subjects down the throat of any other 
man,—but at this Christmas season I do want to say 
to you, just as tenderly and as emphatically as I can, 
that if tonight you make up your mind that, instead 
of taking the judgment of some person who knows 
very little about it, and nothing at all from his own 
experience,—you will take the judgment of Jesus 
Christ on this supreme matter of prayer; and if you 
make up your mind that from tonight you will follow 
the example, not of the man who never prays because 
he thinks it is a useless waste of time, but of Jesus 
Christ, the Son of God, the holy Redeemer of the 
World, Who was constantly found upon His knees in 
prayer,—then I will promise you that you will never 
regret that decision! There are great difficulties in 
connection with this matter of prayer, difficulties 
that are raised by scientists, by philosophers, by un- 
believing men; but I want to say to you that until I 
discover someone whose judgment and whose char- 
acter are to be more completely relied upon, in this 
grave and solemn matter, I am going to take the judg- 
ment and follow the example of Jesus! And tonight I 
would invite you to do the same thing! 


page seventy-three 


What Jesus Caught Concerning the 
Kingdom of God 


HERE can be no doubt about it, and it is just 

as well to admit it frankly, that we human 
beings are very proud people; and our pride 
often leads us to believe, and sometimes to 
assert, that this world in which we live is the 
mite world there is, or, at any rate, the only world 
that is worth talking about. When we read our news- 
papers or the great works of literature, we often fail 
to let our thoughts rise above this present world. 
We forget that there may be worlds that we may know 
nothing about, floating somewhere in space, where 
there may be intelligent beings like ourselves, possibly 
even beings who are far more intelligent than our-_ 
selves. 

But there is, at any rate, one other world, even if 
it is invisible, not merely to us but to the most ex- 
pert astronomer that ever lived,—a world where in- 
telligent beings live, and where the social order is 
something so glorious and so far above our earthly 
ways, that we cannot even imagine it. The name 
that was given by Jesus Himself to that glorious 
order was Heaven. Jesus believed in it, and He 
believed that heaven was the name of an order or a 
society over which the living God presided, and the 
most remarkable feature of that social order, accord- 
ing to the mind of Jesus, was that every member of it 





page seventy-four 


controlled his life, not partly but wholly according to 
the will of God. What a wonderful society it must be! 
God and saints who, in their holy love to Him, offer 
Him through the eternal days a perfect and unfailing 
obedience; for they know that the only happiness for 
God and the only happiness for themselves, and the 
only prosperity of the community, is to be derived 
solely and absolutely from such implicit and unques- 
tioning obedience. That society is not wholly foreign 
to our lives, because there 1s no man or woman in this 
building tonight who has not some beloved friend 
who is a member of it. Those who have been de- 
livered from all the pain and from all the struggle and 
from all the sorrow of this present earthly life and 
have gone home to that supernal realm where God is, 
where God presides, and where all His saints serve 
Him day and night without ceasing,—nay, not by 
night, because there is no night there,—that is the 
kingdom of God. One of the most remarkable utter- 
ances that ever fell from the lips of Jesus is one which 
finds its place in a series of utterances so familiar to 
all of us that we sometimes, I am afraid, miss its won- 
der and its glory: ““Thy will be done on earth, as it is 
done in heaven.”’ The passion of Jesus was that here, 
on this solid world, men and women like us should so 
love God that there would go out from their hearts 
to Him the kind of obedience which is offered to Him 
in the unseen world by the saints that have been re- 
deemed! 

When Jesus Christ came into the world, He brought 
the kingdom of God with Him; because, by His life 
and by His teaching He gave men, for the first time 


page seventy-five 


in the history of the race, clearly to see, or as clearly 
as men can see here below, what sort of a society the 
heavenly kingdom is. This life that Jesus lived for 
God and for us in the world, is the sort of life that is 
lived out yonder in the unseen, holy world; and as that 
life was lived among men, they beheld its glory and 
they were drawn to it,—not all men, not at first many 
men, but here a man and there a man and here an- 
other little group of men,—and so the kingdom of 
God was established here in the world of ordinary 
mortals; and from the day that Jesus first proclaimed 
that truth, the kingdon of God has been growing in 
the world! That is to say, men have been coming 
more and more to see that the kind of life that Jesus 
lived and the kind of life that Jesus made possible for 
us, is the highest kind of life that it is possible for us 
to imagine. They have been, not always in great 
crowds, but always one by one through the passing 
ages, and sometimes in larger companies, pressing 
in to the kingdom of God. 

The kingdom of God on earth is composed of the 
same kind of people of whom it is composed in heaven, 
namely, men and women and little children who have 
come to love God and who desire nothing more pas- 
sionately than to be obedient to His holy will! If that 
is the kind of man that you are, then you are already 
a citizen of the kingdom of God, and day by day you 
are striving to see the will of God done on earth even 
as it is done in heaven. That is why Jesus coupled 
those two petitions together in the prayer He gave us; 
because it is by your striving to do that holy will on 


page seventy-six 


earth and by my striving to do it and by our striving 
to do it together, that His kingdom comes! 

What do you suppose, in your more thoughtful 
moments, is going to be the final destiny of this world 
on which we live? I believe that it is not extravagant 
nonsense, but downright truth and sober science, to 
say that the day is coming,—it may not be yet for 
a great multitude of years,—but the day is assuredly 
coming when this earth will have become such a 
world as will not be capable of supporting on its 
surface any intelligent life, or any life at all; when 
there will be no more human life on this planet; when 
there will be no more marrying and giving in marriage; 
when there will be no more business, as we know it 
now in our social order; no more churches; no more 
theatres; nothing but the world, as cold and dead as 
“yon dead world, the moon!’ That I believe, accord- 
ing to the best scientific thought of the moment, is the 
destiny of our world! If that is true, you may be in- 
clined to ask, What is going to become of all of us? 
What is going to become of this human race? Is all 
this struggle and turmoil, all this patient striving 
after higher and better things, to count for nothing 
in the world in the end? That wasn’t the idea of Jesus. 

The idea of Jesus was, that men and women on 
this world, perishing even as it is beneath our feet 
which sometimes so thoughtlessly trust its solid char- 
acter, are becoming more and more, under the dis- 
cipline of His holy grace and love, fit for the higher 
life of the heavenly kingdom. In other words, down 
here below, as we build up the kingdom of God upon 
the earth, we are at the same time really and truly 


page seventy-seven 


building up the kingdon of God above; because we are 
bringing men and women into the knowledge, and 
from that into the likeness, of Jesus Christ our Lord 
and Master. The destiny of the world is to be, I be- 
lieve, a very cold and tragic destiny. The destiny of 
the kingdom of God upon the earth is to be,—as I 
believe and as Jesus Christ Himself taught us to be- 
lieve,—a destiny of unspeakable glory, of immeasur- 
able beauty and might, because at last God shall reign 
over a kingdom of intelligent beings among whom 
there shall not be found so much as one individual 
who will not wholly and constantly offer to Him com- 
plete and glad obedience! 

There can be no wonder or surprise in our minds, 
if that is true, that Jesus laid it upon those who loved 
Him as a very sacred and a very urgent obligation, that 
they should bring other men and women into this 
most glorious of all secrets; and it remains our busi- 
ness, whether we face the fact or not, to proclaim 
first of all by our lives, then perhaps by our lips, and 
then by every sort of gift that we are capable of be- 
stowing upon such service, the glories of the divine 
kingdom and to bring men, women, children into the 
liberties and into the gladness of its citizenship. 

We saw a few nights ago all that is required for 
membership in this wonderful society. According to 
the teaching of the divine Master Himself, nothing 
is required but repentance, nothing but that we 
should turn from our evil ways and come back to 
God and bow before Him and say to Him that we 
desire above all things to belong to that group, to 
that community, to that kingdom in which men love 


page seventy-eight 


Him and obey His will. Now therefore, if there is any 
man tonight who, through this past year, has been 
outside of that glorious society, who has not been 
living as a citizen of the kingdom of God upon the 
earth, I would like to say to him that this is a very 
good time for Him to take the simple yet decisive 
step, and to become, just as he sits now in this house, 
a member of the kingdom of God! Don’t you feel 
drawn to the kind of life that Jesus makes possible 
even to mortal sinners like ourselves? Don’t you feel 
sure that for you and for all of us there would be 
greater gladness and richer and more real prosperity, 
if only you and we would more completely obey the 
holy law of God, which is a law of love? Let all those 
who are outside come inside tonight; let us make up 
our minds that we shall enter the New Year all be- 
longing to the same kingdom, all belonging to the 
same family; because God’s kingdom and God’s 
family are one and the same thing, because the King 
is the Father! 

If we do that, then it will make a great difference 
with some of us; it will make a great difference with 
the way in which we live after this. For one thing, as 
we meet men and women on the streets, we will in- 
stantly regard them, either as actual or potential 
citizens of the kingdom of God, and that will help us 
to get rid of a great deal of selfishness and a great 
deal of hatred and a great deal of prejudice and a 
great deal of suspicion, all of which I dare say lurk 
in the minds and hearts of many of us this very 
night. We will treat these men and women on our 
streets, and we will treat men and women in other 


page seventy-nine 


lands, as members of the same society; because, re- 
member, it is not to us merely that the great 
invitation is given, but it is to all men everywhere,— 
it doesn’t matter what their nationality is, it doesn’t 
matter what their color is, it doesn’t matter what 
their character is. All men everywhere are invited by 
Jesus to join the kingdom of God! Therefore, we will 
not despise others; we will not hate others; we will 
not regard others as somehow in a lower scale than 
our own; but our hearts will be filled with the sort of 
passion that filled the very heart of Jesus, to have 
everyone come in and enjoy the unspeakable pleasure 
and the unspeakable blessings of this holy society 
whose head and king is God! 

There are lots of difficult questions which scholars 
discuss in learned books about the Kingdom of God 
and its past and its future. I am far more interested 
at this moment in the present of the kingdom of God, 
and I would like you to take this opportunity of step- 
ping across the threshold and coming in! Let us do 
that, and if we do, we shall give to the very heart of 
Jesus, the founder of that kingdom in our world, the 
deepest, yea, the only sort of satisfaction that can 
ever come to His waiting, holy heart! 


page eighty 


What Jesus Caught Concerning 
Kis Second Coming 


HERE is nothing in the whole realm of New 

Testament study which is more certain than 
that Jesus, during His earthly ministry, 
taught that He would return. If any person 
is prepared to dispute that statement, all that 
I myself could say to him would be that, if he does 
not believe that Jesus taught the church to expect 
His second coming, it is absolutely impossible to be 
sure of anything at all in connection with the New 
Testament; therefore, we may as well put it in the 
back of the fire. At the same time, it has to be frankly 
admitted that New Testament scholars are unani- 
mous, or nearly unanimous, in asserting that it is ex- 
ceedingly difficult for anybody to be sure that he 
knows just what Jesus meant, when He said that He 
would come back, and this difficulty 1s created by the 
fact that there is in the teaching of Jesus, on the sub- 
ject, an apparent contradiction. 

In certain passages Jesus is represented as declar- 
ing that His return would take place almost imme- 
diately after His departure; while in other passages 
He is represented as teaching His disciples and His 
friends to expect that the development of the king- 
dom of God on the earth would be a very slow and a 
very prolonged development,—apparently indicating 
that His return was not to be looked for in the near 





page eighty-one 


future, but that it had to be regarded as a distant 
event. The contradiction which is apparent in the 
teaching of Jesus on this subject takes another form, 
because in certain passages He is represented as de- 
claring that His coming back to the world is to be a 
spectacular event, something which all men will be 
able to see; while in other passages He speaks of His 
coming as if it were a purely spiritual thing; so that 
when we take all these passages and put them to- 
gether with this apparent contradiction running right 
through the teaching of Jesus on the subject, our first 
impression is one of great bewilderment, and we say 
to ourselves, Who is sufficient for these things? Can 
we ever understand what Jesus meant at all? It is my 
belief,—and I think that those of you who have 
attended these meetings and studied the teaching of 
Jesus with us, will agree with me,—that if it can be 
shown that some great truth bulks largely in the mind 
and in the teaching of Jesus, it is necessary for us to 
accept it as absolute and final; while, on the other 
hand, I think we are entitled to say that when Jesus 
uttered His abundant teaching with regard to this 
matter of His second coming, He did not mean to 
leave us wholly in the dark, as to His meaning. 

Of course, there are many doctrines taught by Jesus 
which are, and which must remain, to some extent, 
mysterious and obscure to all of us; but there is no 
doctrine taught by Jesus which He left wholly ob- 
secure, for that would be equivalent to saying that 
His doctrine on the subject was without value to us. 
Now therefore, it seems to me that the proper thing 
for us to do is to take the recorded utterances of Jesus 


page eighty-two 


as they come to us in the New Testament, and see 
whether we can not find some consistent doctrine 
running through them all. It is, of course, possible, 
and for myself, I think it is entirely likely, that many 
statements made by Jesus on this subject were mis- 
understood by those who heard them, and that that 
misunderstanding on the part of the friends of Jesus 
was responsible for what I have called the apparent 
contradiction in His teaching. 

What I mean is this: From certain utterances of 
their Master, His friends had drawn a sure and cer- 
tain inference that He would one day return to them. 
They were persuaded that He was to return soon, 
and that all that was meant by the coming back of 
Jesus, was to be manifested and expressed in an event 
of history which would occur at an early date. Of 
course, if that is what the friends of Jesus expected, 
they were wrong, and it is absolutely impossible for 
any sane man to deny that; because, in the full and 
final sense of the term, Jesus did not return soon, and 
the fact that He did not return soon, in the full and 
final sense of that term, is, I think, a perfectly good 
ground on which we may base this inference—that 
the disciples were simply misunderstanding their 
Master when they expected something that didn’t 
happen; and I am certain in my own mind that Jesus 
never foretold what never occurred. 

But the question is: Is there any sense at all in which 
Jesus did return to the world? Has Jesus ever re- 
turned to the world since He made His wondrous 
promises to His friends? I think He has. I sometimes 
think that the expression “the second coming of 


page eighty-three 


Jesus” is liable to be misunderstood, from its very 
form. Jesus has returned more than once to the world 
since He died upon the cross. He returned, in the very 
first place, in His resurrection glory, and He lingered 
in that mysterious fellowship with His disciples for 
several days. Later still, Jesus returned in the form 
of a mighty outpouring of His holy spirit on the 
church, when those who loved Him came, by the 
moving and the guiding of that spirit, to understand 
and comprehend Him as they had never understood 
or comprehended Him before. What was Pentecost, 
that wonderful Pentecost of the opening chapters of 
the Book of Acts, but another coming of Jesus into 
the world? 

I believe that, as we look back over the history of 
the church, we can see the comings of Christ, we can 
see great spiritual happenings, revivals of religion, as 
we are accustomed to call them, when Jesus suddenly 
and on a large scale has come, and has come into His 
own! What is the meaning of a religious revival save a 
new coming of the Son of Man to individuals and com- 
munities? If there was to be a revival of religion in 
this city tomorrow which would not include and in- 
volve such a new experience of Jesus Christ, I for one 
would not care to see it. Furthermore, I think we 
have traced the comings of Jesus, not merely in the 
happenings of spiritual experience, but in the happen- 
ings of what we are accustomed to regard as the 
secular world, a world which, none the less, is con- 
trolled by the same spirit. In the great catastrophes 
of history, when God has come in dreadful ways to 
teach His truth to men, when God has made an ex- 


page eighty-four 


ample of some renegade, turncoat, disloyal people, 
when God has manifested His majesty and the majesty 
of His law,—Jesus Christ has come anew into the 
hearts of men, as the revealer of God and as the 
Redeemer of their hurt and spoiled lives! 

We are accustomed to hear a great deal about the 
harm that the war,—the Great World War,—did to 
religion and to the religious faith of certain people. 
I am not prepared tonight to say that there is nobody 
in the world who lost his faith because of the Great 
War,—I suppose there are such people,—but I do 
want to tell you this—that through the Great War and 
through the tragedy and the tribulation of it, Jesus 
Christ has come into the hearts and lives of multi- 
tudes of men and women. There are men and women 
all over the world tonight to whom, on the fourth of 
August, 1914, Jesus meant precious little; and today 
there is nothing in heaven or on earth that means 
more to those self-same men and women than Jesus 
Christ and Him crucified and His everlasting love! 
I believe that Jesus has come to the world through 
the War. 

And then again, Jesus Himself said, in what is 
perhaps the most precious passage of the New Testa- 
ment, “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come 
again and receive you unto myself.” Jesus apparently 
desires us to think of the very act and hour of death 
as a new coming of our Lord to our spirits. He comes 
to us when He calls us to Himself. Never did Jesus 
speak a word whose truth has been more amply and 
more solemnly vindicated by history, than when He 
said, ““‘Watch, therefore, for in an hour when ye think 


page eighty-five 


not, the Son of Man shall come.” Are you prepared 
for the coming of the Son of Man? What if it should 
be your turn this week? There is nothing on earth 
that is so certain as that one day Jesus Christ will call 
for you; and there is nothing in the world that is more 
uncertain than when that call shall come! 

And I think it is true, besides, that Jesus is gradually 
day by day and year by year, coming to His church 
and through the church to the world? No greater 
slander upon history,—and I think that is practically 
the same thing as to say that no greater slander upon 
God,—has ever been uttered than the slander that 
the world is growing worse. The world is not growing 
worse! Look over the world; take your map out when 
you go home; look at Africa, India, China, Japan, 
South America, look at the countries of Europe, and 
what you will discover is this: That in spite of all the 
tragedies and in spite of all the enmities, Jesus has, 
as a matter of fact, been coming to have a larger and 
a stronger grip of the lives of men and of nations than 
He ever had before. America is not in the League of 
Nations—that is a political theme that I have noth- 
ing to do with tonight—but the League of Nations is 
a reality, and, what is more, it is going to be a reality 
as long as Christian civilization lasts. What I want to 
ask you is this—Could it have come into existence 
one hundred years ago? And I say that it could not. 
Jesus has today a bigger grip of the world than He 
had one hundred years ago. At the same time, after 
we have cut it down and after we have refined it as 
much as we feel inclined to do, the simple fact of the 
matter remains, that Jesus taught that the kingdom 


page eighty-six 


of God would somehow be consummated by His 
personal return. 

You may say that is something that it is impossible 
or difficult to believe, under our present conditions. 
We have come to know much about things since Jesus 
lived and died; still I am here to hand over to you the 
very teachings of Jesus Christ Himself, that is, what 
He taught. What the manner of His coming is to be, 
I dare not try to guess. What the hour of that coming 
is to be, it would be sheer folly even to discuss; but 
what I do press upon myself and upon you is this— 
that from day to day we should be so engaged in our 
bodies and our minds and our spirits, that when Jesus 
comes, we shall not be ashamed before Him at His 
coming! 

I brought a book down tonight with me;—that is 
a thing I never do, except to bring the Bible,—because 
I wanted to read a sentence to you which I thought 
you would like. It is this: A lady once asked John 
Wesley, “Suppose that you knew you were to die at 
twelve o’clock tomorrow night? How would you spend 
the intervening time?” “‘How, indeed?” he replied. 
“Why, just as I intend to spend it now. I should 
preach this night at Gloucester and again at five to- 
morrow morning. (Think of people going to a service 
at five o’clock in the morning). After that, I should 
ride to Tewkesbury, preach in the afternoon and meet 
the societies in the evening. I should then repair to 
friend Martin’s house who expects to entertain me, 
converse and pray with the family as usual, retire to 
my room at ten o'clock, commend myself to my 


page eighty-seven 


heavenly Father, lie down to rest and wake up in 
glory.” 

In other words, his preparation for the Lord’s com- 
ing was, to go about the ordinary tasks of life. When 
Jesus comes, let Him find us waiting for Him, in the 
performing of the highest kind of service of Him and 
of our fellows, to which we can lay our hands! 


page eighty-eight 





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